Windsurf, built by Codeium since 2021, forks VS Code into an AI-native editor built around Cascade, its agentic flow for multi-file, multi-step coding tasks, similar in ambition to Cursor's Composer mode covered elsewhere in this directory.
In 2025, Windsurf went through one of the more dramatic corporate sagas in recent AI history: OpenAI agreed to acquire it for roughly three billion dollars, but the deal collapsed in July 2025 after Microsoft, whose partnership terms give it rights over OpenAI's acquired IP, blocked the purchase of a direct GitHub Copilot competitor. Google DeepMind then paid roughly $2.4 billion to hire Windsurf's CEO, a co-founder, and around forty senior researchers along with a non-exclusive technology license, a structure similar to Microsoft's earlier deal with Inflection AI. Within days, Cognition, the company behind Devin, also covered in this directory, acquired the remaining Windsurf entity, roughly two hundred employees along with its product, brand, and customers, and Windsurf now operates as a Cognition subsidiary.
A free tier covers standard use, and paid plans start around $15 a month for higher usage. For anyone evaluating Windsurf today, it's worth knowing it now operates under Cognition's ownership following that 2025 restructuring, connecting it corporately to Devin, another autonomous coding agent in this same category, rather than continuing as the fully independent company it launched as.
