Continue review

Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant for IDEs and the command line. It brings agent tasks, code completions, and codebase-aware chat into a developer’s workflow, with model choice and task-specific model roles as part of the setup.

Its modes cover different jobs: Agent mode uses tools to inspect, plan, and edit code across multiple steps; Chat answers questions about the codebase in an IDE sidebar; and Edit makes inline changes in the active document. Autocomplete suggests code as you type. Continue CLI extends AI coding assistance to the command line.

The practical distinction is that Continue is not one fixed model bundled into one fixed workflow. Developers can choose models and assign them to chat, editing, autocomplete, and other tasks. That flexibility also means you need to manage configuration and understand which models and usage costs you’re choosing.

Continue’s main appeal is choice. You can bring your own API keys or use local models on the free, open-source Solo plan, and assign different models to different tasks. That gives developers room to fit the assistant around an existing model setup rather than switching everything to one provider.

The feature set covers both quick and multi-step work: inline autocomplete and edits, codebase-aware chat, an agent that can inspect and change code across steps, and a CLI. One commenter on a Reddit thread said they used Continue with several models and found multi-file refactoring straightforward, while another praised its codebase context. Those are individual reports, not a guarantee of output quality.

The listed prices are low to start, but the billing units matter:

• Open Source (Solo): $0 per developer per month; bring your own API keys or use local models.
• Starter: $3 per million tokens, pay as you go.
• Team: $20 per seat per month, including $10 in credits per seat.
• Company: custom pricing.

Starter and Team are priced monthly; annual rates are not published.

Continue’s flexibility comes with configuration and cost decisions that a bundled assistant can hide. You need to choose models, assign roles, and, on Solo, supply your own API keys or local models. The pricing details do not publish seat or usage limits for Solo, Starter, or Team, so the listed prices alone do not tell you how much a team’s workload will cost. Team includes $10 in credits per seat, but other seat and usage limits are not published. Company pricing is custom, and annual rates are not published.

The Starter rate is $3 per million tokens, not a flat monthly subscription. If you want predictable monthly spend, the published information does not provide a usage cap or a typical bill to plan around.

There are also user-reported trade-offs. In one Reddit thread, a Continue user said they wished the team would debug its change-diff function and preferred Cursor’s interface, though they also said Cursor made more mistakes in their own comparison. Treat that as one person’s account, not a product-wide finding.

Continue has a free Open Source (Solo) plan, but you bring your own API keys or use local models. Seat and usage limits are not published. Starter is listed at $3 per million tokens; that is usage-based, not a flat monthly subscription, so your bill depends on usage. The next listed tier is Team at $20 per seat per month, including $10 in credits per seat. That is a shift from token pricing to a seat price, but the included credits do not make the total cost predictable if you need more usage.

Company pricing is custom. Annual rates are not published for Starter or Team, and Continue lists no add-ons. It also does not publish other seat or usage limits for those plans. Before moving a team over, clarify how usage beyond the included credits is charged and what controls are available. If you need a fixed, fully capped AI budget, the published pricing leaves important details unanswered.

Switching to Continue means adopting its IDE and command-line assistant, then choosing models for tasks such as chat, editing, and autocomplete. The product is open source under Apache 2.0, and the Solo plan supports your own API keys or local models. That gives developers model choice, but it also means model selection, configuration, and usage costs are part of the decision—not just the IDE plugin.

The published material does not describe a migration process, data-export tools, or how to transfer existing settings. We would confirm those details before moving a team’s workflows. The same gaps matter when leaving: the available information does not say what configuration can be exported or how easily it can be reused elsewhere. It also includes no Reddit posts or comments, so we can’t responsibly attribute reasons for leaving to users there. Based on the stated trade-offs, Continue may be a poor fit if you want a polished out-of-box setup, published usage caps, or fixed costs.