Devin, the viral coding AI agent, gets a new pay-as-you-go plan

Cognition, the startup behind the viral AI programming tool Devin, has introduced a new low-cost plan to incentivize signups.

When Cognition released Devin last year, the tool quickly blew up on social media for its ability to perform certain software development tasks autonomously. But it soon became apparent that Devin struggled with more complex coding work. Nevertheless, the tool garnered praise from AI founders including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, which substantially raised Cognition’s profile.

Devin became generally available for teams at the eye-watering price of $500 per month. On Thursday — conspicuously weeks after the company reportedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital — Cognition introduced an entry-level option that costs $20, then transitions to a pay-as-you-go plan.

The pay-as-you-go plan could end up being quite costly, depending on how one uses Devin. The initial $20 nets you around 9 ACUs, Cognition’s jargon for computing credits. (ACUs cost $2.25 on the $20 plan, a hike from the $2 they cost on the $500-per-month subscription.) Cognition says that 15 minutes of “active Devin work” is equivalent to about 1 ACU; 9 ACUs only nets around 2.25 hours of work, by that metric — not much when you’re dealing with massive codebases.

But Cognition claims that Devin today — Devin 2.0 — is much improved compared to the December release. Similar to GitHub’s Copilot tool, Devin can now help generate plans for coding projects, as well as answer questions about code with citations and create “wikis” for code with documentation.

Silas Alberti, a member of Devin’s development team, also told TechCrunch that the tool now “gets twice as much work done as before.”

Those claims are best taken with a grain of salt. Even the best code-generating AI today tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and bugs, studies have found, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. One recent evaluation of Devin found that it completed just three out of 20 tasks successfully.