Devin Unveils New Pay-As-You-Go Plan for Viral Coding AI

# Devin

Cognition, the company behind the buzzworthy AI programming tool Devin, has launched a new budget-friendly plan to boost user signups. When Devin hit the market last year, it quickly became a social media sensation thanks to its ability to autonomously handle specific software development tasks. However, it soon became clear that Devin had its limitations, particularly with more intricate coding jobs. Despite this, the tool received accolades from notable figures in the AI community, including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, significantly elevating Cognition's visibility. Initially, Devin was made available to teams at a steep price of $500 per month. But on Thursday—shortly after reports surfaced that the company had secured hundreds of millions in new funding—Cognition rolled out an entry-level option. This new plan starts at just $20 and then shifts to a pay-as-you-go model. The pay-as-you-go approach might turn out to be pricey, depending on how you use Devin. The initial $20 gives you about 9 ACUs, which stands for Cognition's computing credits. On this plan, ACUs are priced at $2.25 each, a bit more than the $2 they cost on the $500 monthly subscription. According to Cognition, 15 minutes of "active Devin work" consumes roughly 1 ACU, meaning 9 ACUs will get you just about 2.25 hours of work—not a lot if you're working with large codebases. Cognition insists that the current version, Devin 2.0, is a significant upgrade from the December release. Much like GitHub's Copilot, Devin can now assist in generating plans for coding projects, answer code-related questions with citations, and even create "wikis" for code documentation. Silas Alberti, part of Devin's development team, shared with TechCrunch that the tool now "gets twice as much work done as before." However, it's wise to approach these claims cautiously. Research shows that even the most advanced code-generating AI can introduce security vulnerabilities and bugs due to shortcomings in understanding programming logic. A recent assessment of Devin revealed that it successfully completed only three out of 20 tasks.

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