AI Coding Assistant Cost Comparator

drag to orbit · scroll/pinch to zoom · tower height = total spend

Scenario controls

Team size: 5 developers Time horizon: 12 months Billing

Heavy-usage overage per dev / mo: $0

Overage models what usage-metered tools add when devs exceed included quotas (extra tokens/requests). It's applied only to the usage-based tiers below.

TCO = seats × price/mo × months
× (annual ? 0.84 : 1)
+ seats × overage × months (usage tiers)

Illustrative tiers (tap a tower or row)

Tool tier	List $/dev/mo	Model	Total (12 mo)

Illustrative pricing. Tiers are representative of the market described in the news item (a ~$16.20/mo challenger vs. ~$20 US rivals and premium usage plans) — not live quotes. Real plans change often; always check vendor pages.

Seat pricing vs. usage pricing — why the cheap sticker can lie (both ways)

Seat (subscription) pricing

Flat $/dev/month with an included usage quota. Predictable — CFOs love it — and cheap stays cheap if your developers stay inside the quota. The catch: quotas are often defined in fuzzy units ("premium requests", "fast responses"), and agentic workflows burn them fast because one task can spawn dozens of model calls.

Usage-based pricing

You pay per token or per request, sometimes on top of a base fee. Light users pay almost nothing; a single dev running long autonomous agent sessions can invoice hundreds of dollars a month. Rule of thumb: an agentic coding session commonly consumes 100k–1M+ tokens, so per-token cost × sessions/day is the number to model — not the base fee.

The three TCO effects people miss

Annual-commit discounts (~15–20%) flip rankings: a $20 seat billed annually (≈$16.80 effective) can undercut a $16.20 monthly seat over a year once any overage exists.
Utilization: if only 60% of licensed devs actively use the tool, your effective price per active dev is sticker ÷ 0.6. Audit seats quarterly.
Switching cost isn't $0: re-prompting habits, custom rules files, CI integrations. A 10% cheaper tool that costs each dev two days of ramp-up needs months to pay back — at a $800/day loaded dev cost, that's ~$1,600/dev of hidden spend.

How to actually decide

Price per accepted unit of work beats price per month: run a two-week trial per tool, count merged PRs assisted, divide spend by that. A tool costing 2× that ships 3× more accepted diffs is the cheap one. Subsidized pricing (common for new entrants buying market share) can also rise after the land-grab phase — model year 2, not just month 1.

Illustrative coding tool costs: base, overage and visual normalization

Your browser does not support video.

Read the explanation

This saved demo compares four anonymous illustrative tiers, not verified current vendor prices. Total cost multiplies seats by months by base price, then adds selected overage only for tiers marked usage-based. At five seats over twelve months, the illustrative twenty-dollar tier has twelve hundred dollars base cost. Setting overage to fifty dollars per developer per month adds three thousand dollars, giving forty-two hundred total. These adjacent segments use point one five pixels per dollar, so the larger overage has proportionally more width. The flat sixteen-dollar-twenty tier remains nine hundred seventy-two and the flat ten-dollar tier six hundred. Their unchanged costs follow a usage flag; this is not evidence of actual unlimited quotas or equivalent tool capabilities. Annual billing in the source applies a point eight four multiplier to the base, representing sixteen percent off that component. It does not discount the overage term. For the same five seats, twelve months and fifty dollars overage, base falls from twelve hundred to one thousand eight, while overage stays three thousand. Total is four thousand eight. The saving is one hundred ninety-two dollars, about four point five seven percent of the complete forty-two hundred dollar bill. Both diagrams use the same dollar scale. The source applies this multiplier even for a one month horizon; it does not model annual commitments, cash payment timing, taxes or cancellation terms. The original three-dimensional towers normalize each cost component by the largest total across all tiers and multiply by a height of nine. Doubling seats or months doubles both numerator and denominator, so the relative towers can remain unchanged while every dollar cost doubles. Minimum height floors further exaggerate very small components. Table selection changes the highlight and selected insight, not the cost calculation. The demo does not model developer adoption, measured time savings, quota exhaustion, token usage or return on investment. In the offline environment the remote Three dependency is unavailable before event listeners and table initialization, so working three-dimensional controls are not proved. The narration explains saved equations without making a purchase recommendation.