Paying $20 a month for Cursor’s Pro plan started to feel hard to justify once the pricing shifted toward usage-based limits. The answer that kept surfacing: Cline, a free, open-source AI coding assistant that lives inside the editor you already use — and can even work fully offline.
Cline AI coding assistant (Credits: How-To Geek)
Why Leave Cursor? Unpredictable Costs And Cloud Dependence
Cursor earned its popularity honestly — a VS Code fork with chat, autocomplete and multi-file edits baked in. But three problems pushed one long-time user away. First, the move toward usage-based limits made monthly costs harder to predict, to the point of rationing prompts. Second, almost everything Cursor does depends on remote servers — a café Wi-Fi drop or a long flight turns the assistant into a plain text editor with a subscription attached. Third, there’s lock-in: as a fork, Cursor can lag behind upstream VS Code releases, and client code gets shipped to third-party servers, which some clients won’t accept.
How Cline Works: Free, Open-Source, Bring Your Own Model
Cline started life as Claude Dev and is released under the Apache 2.0 license. It installs as a regular extension in stock VS Code — no editor switch required. The extension itself costs nothing. It works on a bring-your-own-key basis: connect it to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or aggregators like OpenRouter, and you pay those providers directly for tokens with no markup and no monthly seat fee.
The big win for some users: pair Cline with local models and it keeps working with no internet connection at all, keeping your code entirely on your own machine.
Also Read: CleanSlop Launches Agentic Scan: Audit Your Vibe-Coded App Right Inside Claude Code or Cursor
Source: How-To Geek — read the full story there.
