Warp Terminal changes pricing model | Hacker News Reader

Warp Terminal changes pricing model

warp.dev

39 pointsleglock85 comments

Their old Pro plan at $15/mo (paid annually) had 2,500/mo AI requests per month, use it or lose it.

The new Build plan at $20/mo has 1,500 AI requests, but they roll over. (Edit: apparently they don’t)

> No bones about it: this plan will be more expensive for some users and less expensive for others.

> We get that there’s a lot of whiplash in the AI devtools pricing market, and sympathize. While we expect some churn from this change, we are trying to do it in as minimally disruptive a way as possible.

I’ve found Warp to be very useful, but you’re really paying for AI compute, not the terminal. And the AI compute space is getting very competitive.

From what I understand, in the new plan the 1,500 AI requests don't roll over. Only the add-on credits you buy on top of that will roll over and expire after 12 months.

> On the Build plan, you pay for what you use and credits roll over month to month.

Here’s where I got it from, but I see how it’s ambiguous. “You pay for what you use” sounds a bit like the BYOK (bring your own key) “add-on credits” pricing model you’re referring to.

But in the pricing table, they refer to monthly “AI credits”.

it's not ambiguous:

> For the Build plan, credits will not rollover but Reload credits will rollover and be valid for 12 months from the date of purchase.

Pricing model for a terminal. What a time to be alive.

> Can I continue to use Warp as my primary terminal?

> Yes, the Terminal features of Warp will continue to be free to use for developers across Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Well this is something at least I guess.

Who cares when Ghostty exists though...

your spelled iTerm2 wrong :)

How do I run this on Windows and Linux?

Ghostty aims to be cross-platform (I think Windows support isn’t there yet but is planned), but iTerm2 is macOS-only.

I was on iTerm2 for a pretty loong time. You should try out Ghostty.

You meant "iTerm2 with no scrollbars and no scrollback history search" was spelled wrong.

(yes I know they are working on it; but I also know iTerm2 and Konsole have had them since about forever, and I use that feature a lot, so it's kinda major impediment)

How are all of you spelling WezTerm wrong.

Just started using this - it's pretty nice. Very customizable but it makes my oh-my-zsh setup look like crap with it's fonts.

I started using it since it's cross platform and I use chezmoi, but the config quickly gets complicated if you want things like folders in your tab titles, etc

iTerm2 is not in the same league when it comes to speed.

I’m on ghostty but warp is a lot more than a terminal. I used to consider their product to be a shitty AI powered terminal until I saw a demo of it. Now I consider it as a fair AI agent application that has a good CLI integration and some notebook features.

Ghostty is an interesting project, but it’s not usable yet for those of us who use scrollback history search until they ship that feature https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

The growing popularity of ghostty has made me realize a lot of people don’t use scroll back history search. I use it frequently to save time and avoid having to rerun time intensive tasks to pipe them through grep or tee everything to a file.

This exactly! Can't move from iterm2 until this feature, which is absolutely essential to me, is implemented.

Love the work they're doing though!!

Are there any workarounds?

In my ghostty config I use:

  scrollback-limit = 512000000
  keybind = super+f=write_scrollback_file:open

It writes it to a temporary file and then opens the file in the default text editor when I hit Cmd+F.

tmux

But there's a whole thread on other workarounds etc. Apparently it's on the roadmap.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

The other thing keeping me on iTerm is Ghostty lacking tab support in quake mode

I'm pretty certain that exists, at least on macOS, but I don't use that feature. I just follow development.

Source: ghosty maintainer

I like Ghostty, but it's still missing a few features I need. Warp was interesting, but it was honestly overwhelming when I was simply reaching for a terminal. For now, I'm back on Terminal.app until Ghostty catches up feature wise.

> Pricing model for a terminal. What a time to be alive.

You’re really paying for AI compute, not the terminal.

Subscriptions: AI makes it necessary.

"What a time to be alive"

s/a/an awful/

Some days I feel like everything peaked around mid-2000.

I agree.

Whan awfult a time to be alive

at least they didn't add /g

  $ echo "What a time to be alive" | sed s/a/an awful/
  sed: -e expression #1, char 6: unterminated `s' command

Whan awfult a time, indeed. :( Shoulda ran fred instead of sed.

To be honest there were a lot of "small" paid utility programs around mid-2000.

> Pricing model for a terminal. What a time to be alive.

As soon as they raised like 50M+ (why you'd ever need 50 million dollars to build a terminal—which have been essentially "solved" since the 1970s—is a pretty good question), this was bound to happen. Same nonsense will happen to Zed, etc.

Oh no. Did I miss something? Did Zed get a bunch of unnecessary funding that will force them to do some subscription we'll all hate?

https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed

Well, they already have subscriptions for the agent usage, so the hope is that the editor will keep being free.

To be fair, for those of us who live in a terminal, the terminal is/was not solved.

Old terminals are slow and have a bunch of weird Unicode issues.

Now, Warp is a terrible product, and I have nothing nice to say about them.

But look at modern terminals like Kitty or Ghostty. There are so many very nice improvements. Like mouse support that works well (as opposed to "kind of works, but who needs a mouse?!, won't fix"), fast keyboard response (you'd think it wouldn't be noticeable, but it's very noticeable), copy-and-paste that makes sense and isn't different from everything else on the system, etc.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

https://ghostty.org/

And if you want to overhaul everything obsolete about the terminal and the shell, there's still more room for improvement: https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-lin...

> Old terminals are slow and have a bunch of weird Unicode issues.

rxvt-unicode is plenty fast and handles unicode well, at least as far as I can tell...

It's not "a terminal", it's a terminal with AI features that cost money to run. I understand you may not be interested in them, but let's not pretend that burning GPU power comes for free.

My machine has a perfectly fine CPU. A text box to enter OpenAI credentials would also be an easy fix.

At least from their docs it seems like you can do exactly this.

If you pay for Claude Code, couldn't you then say you're paying for Visual Studio Code? Or if you use CC in the CLI, you're also paying for that terminal? Warp is just packaging AI with their terminal product.

The difference is the point of sale. With VS Code, you purchase your AI compute elsewhere (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.), and then use it through the free VS Code interface.

With Warp, you purchase your AI compute through Warp (who then pays Anthropic, Open AI, etc. based on the model you choose).

All up until the point that you get a "Dear Valued Customer" letter.

> Well this is something at least I guess.

Until they change their TOS and use all your terminal input to train their models.

I'm being sarcastic but how things are going something like this wouldn't surprise me at all.

Also terminal sending telemetry. So many no goes.

I’m not a huge fan of Warp, but I would love for any other terminal to copy its text editor-style input field.

It’s so much nicer for 90% of my terminal usage (long multi-line commands, etc.) And when you do need TUI behavior that 10% of the time, just toggle it off.

M-x shell :)

I loved that from Warp too. Went back to iTerm because Warp was regularly consuming more than 1GB of RAM. I also don't want anything related to AI reading my terminal commands.

iTerm2 users who want AI integrated in their terminal, including free/open weight models can do that [1].

[1]: https://iterm2.com/documentation-ai-chat.html

The fish shell has multi line editing, completion explanations, and completion and history selection. Terminal integration could make these features even better. But Warp's account wall disqualified it for me.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'd heard of fish but didn't realize that was a feature. It seems quite nice.

Why not just type “fc” and edit your multiline command in a real editor? (Like you’ve been able to do since at least the 1980s).

I know I’m going to come across as a bitter old geezer, but with a lot of things like this the “features” seem to be pale imitations of things which already exist and the real root problem is people just don’t invest the time to learn the tools they already have.

Wow TIL about fc. Thanks for mentioning.

Very very happy to help. Enjoy!

Most shells can help with this. vim mode helps, zsh also has 'edit-command-line' that can open the command in an editor but idk if it has a keybind by default.

That ZSH feature is builtin to readline, so you can use it in a ton of shells.

I think everybody here that is bashing Warp specifically as a terminal application probably spends a lot more time in the terminal than GUI apps.

For someone who don't, killer features:

- GUI settings - Regular text navigation - Just enough free AI for ffmpegging - Pretty nice theming, gruvbox + 70% opacity is chef's kiss - Command blocks are a nice - Restore sessions are nice - Input area error underlines, syntax highlighting, command suggestions

For someone who was never a big terminal user and now tries to use it occaisonally but still spends 95%+ time in GUI apps, this makes configuring, getting in, getting work done, and getting out super easy. When working on web projects, I'll usually run my apps in vscode for easier error logging & fixing workflows, and use warp for accessory things like installing packages.

People really log in to their terminal emulator? And it's closed source and connected to the internet?

My terminal emulator handles all sorts of confidential data, credentials, API keys etc. I can't even imagine the damage that can be caused by a rogue terminal emulator.

While I can not FATHOM using something like warp ever. I liked the writing, straight to the point, offered a conciliatory feature (BYOK).

I wish them success. I would like more of my vendors to operate their pricing this clearly.

Fair play to them for the way they communicated this. I like their style.

However, I've been a Pro user for several months (use < 1000 credits a month) - but I've noticed a real reduction in quality over the past month or so. I'm now getting random failures, stopping of agents etc.

The same with copilot for office. It was much better before but it seems like they're really turning the screws on the compute. Especially the research agent is pretty useless now and it was really powerful.

I guess these companies are running into issues not being able to expand capacity fast enough. Even a hyperscaler like Microsoft can't power a whole hype cycle. Or they're just squeezing to get more bottom line.

I tried warp last year and I wanted to like it but it just felt slower and more bloated. I don’t know if it’s improved since then, but I have a hard time seeing how the terminal is worth using. I’m ignoring price here and focused on value add. My main issue is that I don’t see more features as being more value, rather there are a lot of distractions and the learning curve to learn the various features doesn’t seem worth it. I also dislike vscode forks like cursor due to complexity, so maybe it’s meant more for certain kinds of users.

Like all products in the AI space today, it's a question of whether what it costs creates that much value each month. While it's not a force-multiplier in the same sense as Claude Code or Codex, I still think Warp is, even at $20, but that's probably pushing it (I've had months where I was able to speed run an unfamiliar workflow with Warp, and other months where I didn't use it for anything that iTerm couldn't handle)

For $20/month, I can buy a Claude Code subscription and have it drive my terminal on autopilot. Tool calling in traditional LLMs might just obsolete Warp's business model.

Unlike many comments here, I love Warp.

Don’t use or pay for any AI features. But it’s really nice having a terminal with multi-cursor and keyboard shortcuts like an editor.

Yea all the AI features seem like a huge distraction to Warp. I hope they don't kill the terminal.

Is there a terminal that offers this same experience,? All the comments here seem to be people crapping on it without trying it. it's really great for someone who develops but spends maybe only 5 percent of their time in the terminal for minor tasks

I really loved Warp during its earlier stages.

They added so many things I couldn’t keep up and I as just tired of updating it on launch every single day.

Hard to tell from their main website what warp is anymore - I thought it was a terminal, but now it's an AI code editor? Or is it just a terminal that looks extremely like a code editor? Gotta tap into that sweet unlimited pile of AI cash I guess.

I’ve been using Warp (for the AI features) for a while now, but less and less these days. They’re way too agile with the UI/UX, things change around too much for it to be what it is supposed to be.

from simple "slightly better terminal" to overloaded with questionable features. i have cursor, why do i need warp? especially since cursor can also run shell commands.

So my annual plan that renews in February - I am just going to whatever value is left if I want to switch to the build plan to bring my own key. Well shoot

Warp is so horribly broken right now and has been for weeks. Multiple github issues on what I experience is consistent issue writing file. On top of that UI glitches, and inability to use the great code indexing feature, file and diff Explorer while in WSL or any ssh connection. It unfortunate because I liked it a lot before, but after multiple weeks with the same breaking issues, it's practically unusable.

Pretty clear announcement. Unfortunate price increases but that's how it goes right now.

Am I missing something? $20 per month for a terminal?

Why wouldn’t you just use Ghostty and claude code?

Claude Code also costs $20/month for the lowest paid tier.

I’m no against paying a subscription. I just don’t quite understand the benefit of an ai terminal.

Juicero for bash. And the pricing model changes doubtless right on time for the VC money to run out.

Yep, I can smell shite.

> Juicero for bash.

This is exactly it.

Just pay OpenAI, Anthropic, Google for your AI CLI tools and use ANY terminal → DONE.

It is going to be way better than boutique integrations like Warp's, Cursor's, etc. anyway.

Paying for a terminal, lmao.

Terminal is free. AI integration isn't.

Yeah but why would anyone pay for that when you can just use Codex/ClaudeCode/Amp/etc...

I don't even bother with iTerm's AI integration because why would I???

Jesus, this company hasn’t died yet? Praying for magic AI fairy dust to save it, like everyone.

props for not fucking around in the title or first few paragraphs about the consequences, but man was it a bad idea to give people the idea you're a per-month-fee terminal.

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