Trae AI offers 1,000 advanced model requests per month for $10, which is exactly half the price of Cursor’s $20 Pro tier for double the fast-request volume. For a developer making 50 agentic requests per workday—triggering multi-file refactors or complex debugging loops—Trae costs roughly $0.50 per day, whereas Cursor hits its 'fast' limit mid-month and requires a $20 top-up or leaves you in a throttled queue. This is a classic market-share play by ByteDance, subsidizing high-compute models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o to undercut established Western incumbents.
The 'Builder' mode is functionally equivalent to Cursor’s Composer, allowing you to generate entire boilerplate structures from a single prompt. However, the 'SOLO' agent is where the tool differentiates itself technically. While GitHub Copilot remains largely reactive, SOLO operates as an autonomous loop that can run terminal commands, read logs, and iterate on its own code without manual 'Accept' clicks for every line. It feels less like an autocomplete and more like a junior developer working in a separate room. In testing, SOLO successfully navigated a 15-file React migration by identifying missing dependencies in package.json and fixing them before I had to prompt it.
The trade-off is the underlying infrastructure. Trae is a VS Code fork, so your existing extensions and keybindings transfer without friction, but the codebase indexing is not local. Code is uploaded to their servers for embedding and context retrieval. For a team managing a 100k LoC repository, this means your entire intellectual property resides on ByteDance infrastructure. Their privacy policy is transparently aggressive, noting that chat logs are retained permanently and code snippets are stored temporarily for model training unless opted out—though the opt-out mechanisms for enterprise users remain opaque compared to Claude’s 'Zero Retention' or GitHub Copilot’s enterprise settings.
Technically, the IDE is snappy. Latency on Claude 3.5 Sonnet requests via Trae is comparable to the Anthropic API directly, often hovering around 1.5 to 2 seconds for initial token generation. The 'Context' window management is superior to standard VS Code extensions, as the native integration allows it to see open editors, terminal output, and file trees simultaneously without the overhead of the LSP-to-Extension bridge.
Skip Trae if you are working under strict SOC2 compliance or on proprietary corporate IP where data sovereignty is a non-negotiable requirement. Use it if you are an independent developer or a startup on a tight budget that needs the highest possible intelligence-to-dollar ratio and doesn't mind ByteDance holding the keys to your chat history.
Pricing
Trae’s free tier is currently the most aggressive in the market, offering 1,000 requests to models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o for $10/month (often marketed as free during its initial launch phase). For comparison, a standard GPT-4o subscription is $20/month and doesn't include the agentic IDE wrapper. The cost cliff occurs at the 1,000-request mark, after which you are moved to 'slow' requests, which are essentially deprioritized tokens. There are no per-token charges for users; it is a flat-rate model designed to lure users away from Cursor’s 500-request limit. The hidden cost is the data: ByteDance’s retention policy for chat logs and code context is significantly more permissive than the 'Enterprise' tiers offered by Microsoft or Anthropic.
Technical Verdict
Trae is a stable VS Code fork (v1.9x) with excellent extension compatibility. The 'SOLO' agent handles multi-file edits through a proprietary orchestration layer that is significantly more reliable than basic LLM-based file editing. Latency is minimal because the tool utilizes optimized inference endpoints for the major models. Documentation is currently thin, focusing more on marketing features than API specifics, but because it’s a VS Code fork, most technical troubleshooting follows standard VS Code patterns. The indexing of local files is handled server-side, which speeds up initial context retrieval at the cost of local privacy.
Quick Start
# No standard API; Trae is a standalone IDE.
# To use the agentic SOLO mode:
# 1. Open Trae IDE
# 2. Cmd+I to open the Builder/SOLO panel
# 3. Type: "Build a FastAPI backend with JWT auth"
# 4. Watch SOLO create files, install deps, and test routes.Watch Out
- ByteDance's privacy policy allows for permanent retention of your chat logs for training purposes.
- Codebase indexing requires uploading your project structure to their servers; there is no true offline indexing mode.
- The 'SOLO' agent can occasionally perform destructive terminal commands if not monitored closely during multi-step tasks.
- Being a VS Code fork, it may lag behind the latest official VS Code releases by several months.