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The Stack / Coding
Devin
03 CreationWorth a real trial on a free account first — Cognition replaced the old $20-plus-ACU Core plan with a Free/Pro/Max ladder on July 7, so 'assign a ticket to an AI' now costs nothing to test before you commit to Pro. It shines on well-specified, bounded tasks (migrations, test coverage, dependency bumps) and still wanders on vague ones. Spec tightly, review everything.
The job in the stack
The delegated-engineering seat: an agent that takes whole tickets — bugfixes, migrations, small features — and returns pull requests.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Light quota, limited model access — former Core users were migrated here |
| Pro | $20/mo | Full model access (SWE 1.6, Claude, Gemini), cloud agents; overage billed in dollars past quota |
| Max | $200/mo | Same feature set as Pro, significantly higher quota |
| Teams | $80/mo + $40/seat | Usage-based; former $500/mo Team plan migrated here at a lower entry point |
| Enterprise | custom | VPC, SSO, dedicated support |
Pricing verified 2026-07-07. Plans change — the source of truth is Devin's own pricing page.
Models & versions
- Devin (Cognition)Autonomous ticket-to-PR workflow: plans, codes, tests, opens the pull request; SWE 1.6 is the current flagship model on Pro/Max
The honest read
What works
- +Whole-ticket delegation: it returns PRs, not suggestions
- +Excellent at grind work — migrations, coverage, upgrades — that stalls human queues
- +Free tier now lets you evaluate before paying anything
What breaks
- −Vague tickets produce expensive wandering — specification quality is the leverage
- −Every PR still needs human review; autonomy isn't correctness
- −No more pay-as-you-go-only option — ongoing use past Free now requires a paid plan
Use it for
- →Engineering teams with backlogs of well-defined maintenance work
- →Framework migrations and dependency upgrades at scale
- →Test-coverage sprints nobody wants to staff
Skip it if
- ×You want interactive pair-programming — Cursor and Claude Code are that
- ×Your tickets are one-line vibes — fix the specs before hiring an agent
Questions operators ask
?Devin or Claude Code?
Claude Code works with you in the terminal — interactive, steerable, immediate. Devin works without you — assign the ticket, get a PR. Interactive depth versus asynchronous throughput; mature teams end up using the pattern, not the brand: supervised agents for hard problems, delegated agents for grind.
?What happened to Devin's ACU pricing?
Cognition dropped the $20-plus-$2.25-per-ACU Core plan and the flat $500/mo Team plan in favor of Free, Pro ($20/mo flat), Max ($200/mo), and Teams ($80/mo base plus $40/seat) — a lower, simpler entry point than the old structure.
What changed
- Released from staging. Cognition retired the Core/ACU plan for a Free/Pro ($20)/Max ($200)/Teams ($80+$40 per seat) ladder — corrected before release; the ACU-billed Core plan no longer exists.
- Added to the stack (delegated-engineering seat).
Give Devin a job
The delegated-engineering seat: an agent that takes whole tickets — bugfixes, migrations, small features — and returns pull requests.
Try Devin →Alternatives with different jobs
Cursor
03 CreationThe hands-on coding seat: an editor where AI agents write, refactor, and navigate the codebase with you.
Claude
02 DecisionsThe thinking seat: long documents, hard reasoning, code, and anything where the words have to be right the first time.
GitHub Copilot
03 CreationThe completion seat: always-on code suggestions in your existing editor, plus agent work metered by AI credits.