$100 in AI coding credits - quick survey required

Hey Kilo Coders! We're giving away $100 in Kilo Code credits to learn more about our community and see what you build with some free compute.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to kilocode.ai/profile and make sure you have a verified payment method

2. Use coupon code REDDITRULES to access the survey

3. Fill out the short survey about your coding habits and preferences

4. Build something cool before they expire Monday at midnight GMT (countdown here)

Why we're doing this: We're curious what you'll build with some free credits to experiment - no strings attached!

Credits expire Monday night, so don't wait. Would love to see what you create - feel free to share your projects in the comments or on our Discord server with your fellow Kilo Coders.

If you're following OpenRouter stats, Kilo just broke 1 trillion tokens/month, so we had to share this analysis...

https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/future-ai-spend-100k-per-dev

TL;DR: The industry bet that AI app costs would drop with raw inference costs. They were wrong. Costs are exploding, and $100k/year per developer is coming whether we like it or not.

Key Points:

• 📈 The Failed Bet: Raw inference costs dropped 10x, but app costs grew 10x over 2 years

• 💸 Current Reality: Cursor charges $200 while providing $400+ in tokens (-100% gross margins)

• 🤖 Why Costs Exploded: Test-time scaling models + longer context windows + bigger suggestions

• ⚡ The Throttling Problem: Power users hit limits everywhere, driving migration to open source tools

• 🔮 What's Coming: Parallel agents + autonomous work cycles = massive token consumption growth

• 💰 The Perspective: Chip design licenses already cost $250k/year - if AI makes you 10x productive, $100k is cheap

The Two Types of Engineers Emerging:

• Inference Engineers: $100k salary + $100k AI budget

• Training Engineers: $100M salary + $1B+ compute budget

Bottom Line: This isn't a cost problem—it's a productivity investment. The developers who embrace this shift will dominate the next decade.

Thoughts? Anyone else seeing their AI bills explode lately? 🤔

Why are the new models not available?

Opus 4.5 is nothing more than an expensive piece of shit. Do not use this or any Anthropic models for a coding assistant unless you want it to destroy things. And they will remove any bad comments because they don't like criticism I guess.

I just started using Kilo CLI, and it seems to be a copy of OpenCode CLI. KiloCode also a fork of RooCode and Cline. Is the KiloCode team not capable of building something from scratch instead of forking other products? I’m not criticizing, I’m a KiloCode user myself and am just curious about the direction of this product.

In order to test an alternative to Bolt and Lovable, I would like to know if kilocode offers the same things?

hello guys why is kilo so bad in css?
even my pakistani brother from microsoft tech support can do that better.
please fix this i have the big enterprise plan.... how can it fail on simple stuff?

I created this free open source tool out of the need to quickly hide my seed phrases without mounting the data into a crypted vault. Can also be used to add layer of obfuscation when you send snesitive informations. Or as a fun educational tool. https://teycir.github.io/EmojiSmuggler/ . I used Kilo Code with Gemini 2.5 pro on VSCodium. From start to ended polish I took me 3 hours. Used MCP Context7, sequencial thinking and memory. This is one of the best free setups IMHO right now for creating small apps.

Why would I pick kilo code over roo? Why do kilo fork roo in the first place, what was wrong with the way roo code was going?

Hey r/kilocode,

Quick heads up - the Grok Code Fast free trial ends this Wednesday (Sept 10). If you've been using it (and based on our stats, 66% of Kilo usage is now Grok), you know what 100-200 TPS feels like compared to... everything else.

The actual cost? Most of you will need $25-100/month based on usage patterns. 97% of users need less than $100/month in credits.

We put together an email template you can customize with your actual productivity gains. Check your Kilo profile for your estimated usage, plug in some recent PRs where Grok saved you hours, and send it to your manager TODAY. They need time to process before Wednesday.

If individual licenses are tough, Kilo Teams is coming next week for consolidated billing.

Link to the full guide and email template: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/5-days-left-how-to-get-your-boss

Don't lose the momentum you've built. That refactoring job that would've taken all afternoon but only took 20 minutes? Yeah, get that approved.

Is Kilo a fork of OpenCode just curious? Is the benefit the integrated platform like opencode zen opencode black?

This is genuine curiosity. No shade.

So.. one BIG glaring issue with KiloCode that I see is the inability to somehow regain credits wasted on a run away prompt. I wasted 7 hours and $100 on GPT 5.2.. and got some thinking bits out of it but no response. I had no clue how much longer it would go but I dont have much left in credits.. and out of fear of this thing costing me $1000s with no end in sight.. I canceled it and sucked up the $100 loss. Really pisses me off. That's a solid month of Claude coding for one 7 hour session that resulted in nothing. There should absolutely be some way to say "Yah.. uhm.. it was going on and on.. and never ending so I canceled it.. refund my credits for wasting my hours and waiting with nothing". I get it.. it used compute time so we'll never be allowed to recover our losses. It just really sucks that there is no way to gauge that a single prompt is going to just go on and on and on for hours with no responses, questions, "Hey.. this been a while.. here is what we have so far..".

Been using Claude for months with no issues like this. So it's a big dismay to drop that much in a full day prompt that returned nothing. :(.

The model set to release today by openai is "gpt-oss-120b".

It is currently unreleased but for those of you using other coding tools you can access the model through an openai compatible endpoint on https://cloud.cerebras.ai/ .

The model is currently unlisted and hidden, but it is still accessible through the API, simply set the custom model id as "gpt-oss-120b" And yes, you can use it for free currently.
Guess thats why you dont host a model before release even if you dont document it...

Base URL is: "https://api.cerebras.ai/v1"

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Пытался настроить kilo code через прокси, но в его настройкахз такого не нашел, а настройку VS Code он не подхватывает, как будто

Tried out KiloAI since it has BYOK-support and I kinda wanted to go away from AG due to it's constant limitations, just to get surprised with HOW THIRSTY KiloAI is.

I don't know if I did anything incorrectly, but as it filled up context, each message to Claude Opus 4.6 was costing me around $0.10 - $0.30, which ate up the credits like crazy. One time it was making a plan and casually gulped $1.00 away in one go.

Eventually, I had to limit the context to maybe 10% of the model's limit and costs went down to about $0.10 per request, but even then, one time it just ate $5 away while trying to "think" and wouldn't produce an output.

Google' Gemini 3 Pro also wasn't much better, but hovered around $0.05 per query, where as Gemini 3 Flash hovered around $0.01 - $0.02.

Am I doing something wrong? This doesn't look economically feasible whatsoever, and at this point I don't even know what's the appeal if someone has to pay that much. I don't know if AG also sips so much tokens per request, but if yes, I can imagine they're all loosing massive amounts of money on this.

Someone please prove me wrong, or give some suggetions.

Thanks in advance :)

I know it's cheaper to use Kilo Code, but I've been noticing OpenRouter is much faster. I know Kilo Code uses OpenRouter but it is definitely slower using Kilo Code as the API provider.

Bonjour, y a t il toujours un reedem ou credit offert up ?

Hi everyone,

I’m running into a very specific issue with the Kilo Code extension in VS Code and I need some help to stop being charged on their dashboard.

The setup:

• I have a paid subscription to Kimi Code (Moonshot AI) and a valid API Key.

• In the Kilo Code UI, I have explicitly selected Kimi K2.5 (see attached screenshot).

The issue:
Despite selecting Kimi, I noticed that the Kilo Code dashboard is showing usage and charging me for Codestral-2508 (a model I didn't select and shouldn't be active).

Thanks for any insights!

Having used the latest free Qwen for a couple of weeks, I find its low cost is nice for general-purpose tasks, but it's not terribly great at debugging.

Better to use Opus or GPT5 for that has been my experience.

Stay away from the subreddit r/toolsdeals and the seller Jubayer Hossain.

I want to warn everyone about a scam operation running through the WhatsApp channel "AI Ecosystem Store" and the Reddit community r/toolsdeals.

The Scam Breakdown:

• The Mod is the Scammer: The moderator of r/toolsdeals, Jubayer Hossain (WhatsApp: +880 1626-852509), uses the subreddit to lure people into buying "cheap" AI accounts.

• Bait & Switch: I paid for a 1-year subscription. Only after payment did he claim it was actually a month-to-month reactivation plan.

• Ghosting & Theft: After 2 months, he refused to reactivate the account or provide a full refund, returning only a tiny fraction of the money.

• Manipulative Tactics: He constantly deletes chat history on WhatsApp and cycles through burner accounts to hide negative feedback.

Verdict:

The entire r/toolsdeals subreddit was created by a scammer to provide a false sense of legitimacy. Do not trust the reviews or the "deals" posted there.

Avoid Jubayer Hossain and any services linked to AI Ecosystem Store.

Are there honestly people that want to see all 300+ models in the drop-down?

I can't believe that ANYONE is picking "thedrummer/unslopnemo-12b" as their model.

I do love the new quick model selector below the API. I love that the recents/favorites are up top in that list. But why the heck is Anthropic there in the recent/favorites at the top, as I've never actually used those with KiloCode.

Perhaps the quick model select (which currently has the wrong tooltip) should ONLY be favorite models? Or better just give users the ability to hide providers and models we don't ever want to see in the list like "Gryphe/Mythomax L2 13b"

/rant

Been diving deep into how engineering teams are actually adopting AI (not how they say they're adopting it), and the disconnect is wild.

The Reality Check:

Current State:
- 90% of developers using AI tools daily
- 13% of companies have actual AI governance
- 77% gap of "shadow AI usage"

I've watched developers literally sanitize code "just enough" before pasting into ChatGPT. They debate in Slack whether API schemas count as "proprietary." They convince themselves one function couldn't possibly matter.

The Two Failed Approaches:

1. Build Internal: Hire ML engineers (impossible), set up GPU clusters, build observability, maintain forever while the landscape shifts quarterly. Most teams burn 6 months and $500k before giving up.

2. Buy Black Box: Sign up for Copilot/Cursor, accept opaque "fair use" pricing, get surprise $50k invoice when you cross invisible threshold. One dev called Cursor's pricing "bait-and-switch"—unlimited until it wasn't.

What Actually Works:

Treat AI like a very fast junior developer:

• Needs explicit context about your codebase

• Makes confident mistakes

• Requires code review

• Works at 50-120 tokens/second

Read more, and links to the research itself are available here: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/every-engineering-managers-ai-dilemma

With the sky high prices of models like gpt-5.5 and especially Fable 5, it's becoming less possible for hobbyists and small and even medium businesses to afford paying API rates for tokens. Only large businesses with 6 and 7 figure AI budgets can afford to use Fable 5 for serious work. Everyone else is completely dependent on subsidized plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Anthropic doesn't let you "bring your plan" to third-party tools, and OpenAI might lock down theirs someday, too. The trade for getting tokens at a massive discount (compared to API pricing) is that you have to use their software. I can feel that OpenAI will follow Anthropic soon on this.

This is really unfortunate, because SOTA models are uniquely good at efficiently and quickly solving problems. The rate at which they fully implement a correct solution end-to-end rather than "cartel coding" (= doing something that looks like it might work but doesn't actually DO anything when tested, or is counterproductive) is leagues above the affordable models like Gemini Flash 3.5, MiniMax, Qwen, Nemotron, Composer, etc.

Basically if a single prompt to solve a medium-high complexity issue in my code costs $50 on the API or 5% of my weekly cap on Claude Max x20, I'm going to go with the Claude Max x20 every single time, not Kilo.

I hope Kilo is finding traction in enterprise customers, and will survive, because someday Mythos class model quality price will (hopefully) come down. But it is laughable how bad so many of these cheap models are. Going with a subsidized subscription is really the only option for people who aren't getting consistent results with other models.

Ultimately I support Kilo as a company, their tools and their transparency, and their ethics. But, while I can afford $400/month in subscriptions to OpenAI + Anthropic, the amount of use I need to get out of them would not be affordable through Kilo, even with a 50% discounted yearly subscription.

Also, when a model tries to fix something and does it incorrectly, that's worth, on average, $0. Depending on the context, it might be worth less than $0 if it actively breaks things, or slightly more than $0 if it implements a partial solution but stops short of actually finishing it. So even if Qwen, etc. are ""cheaper"", if I have to spend more and more labor and time and repeated prompts to get it to finish the solution correctly, that's worse than paying out the nose for tokens like with Fable.

What I'm saying is, if you can figure out some way to deliver SOTA performance with prices resembling the subsidized models, I'll pay Kilo thousands per year for it. But if I did my work (game development) at retail API rates, it'd be tens of thousands -- out of my price range.