The era of cheap AI coding assistants may be over

As developers continue to adopt vibe coding tools to increase efficiency, CIOs may need to rethink their IT budgets.

With vendors like Cursor, Claude Code, and Kiro converging on similar pricing tiers, mostly due to infrastructure costs remaining stubbornly high, the era of cheap AI coding assistants appears to be over, at least for now.

According to industry experts, this isn’t a cartel-like pricing strategy but a reflection of real-world constraints.

“It’s a combination of factors such as strained GPU supply, high model licensing costs, and infrastructure overheads. To add to that, only a handful of firms have achieved mature enough capabilities in the space that actually help developers,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, lead of the CIO practice at The Futurum Group.

AI coding assistants usage on the rise

Several developer surveys conducted in the last 12 months show that AI coding assistants are becoming a part of any developer’s toolkit. 

The 2025 Developer Survey conducted by Stack Overflow across all its users, who are mostly developers, showed that 84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase of 8% from last year.

The survey was based on over 49,000 responses received from 177 countries, covering 62 questions that focused on various technologies, including a new emphasis on AI agent tools and large language models (LLMs).

A separate survey from last year, conducted by GitHub, showed that more than 97% of 2,000 respondents have used AI coding tools at work.

That same survey found that 59% to 88% of respondents across all markets reported their companies were “actively encouraging” or “allowing” use of AI coding tools.

Also, software development teams were recognizing more benefits with AI coding tools than previously found, the report showed, adding that most respondents reported a perceived increase in code quality when using AI coding tools, otherwise popularly termed as vibe coding tools.

CIOs to look at vibe coding tools as a productivity expense?

However, recent pricing changes across most vibe coding tools have resulted in developers consuming credits much faster than before, thereby needing to spend more to continue using these tools.

Developers have taken to social media platforms and GitHub to express their dissatisfaction over the pricing changes, especially across tools like Claude Code, Kiro, and Cursor, but vendors have not adjusted pricing or made any changes that significantly reduce credits consumption.

Analysts don’t see any alternative to reducing the pricing of these tools.

“There’s really no alternative until someone figures out the following: how to use cheaper but dumber models than Claude Sonnet 4 to achieve the same user experience and innovate on KVCache hit rate to reduce the effective price per dollar,” said Wei Zhou, head of AI utility research at SemiAnalysis.

Considering the market conditions, CIOs and their enterprises need to start absorbing the cost and treat vibe coding tools as a productivity expense, according to Futurum’s Hinchcliffe.

“CIOs should start allocating more budgets for vibe coding tools, just as they would do for SaaS, cloud storage, collaboration tools or any other line items,” Hinchcliffe said.

“The case of ROI on these tools is still strong: faster shipping, fewer errors, and higher developer throughput. Additionally, a good developer costs six figures annually, while vibe coding tools are still priced in the low-to-mid thousands per seat,” Hinchcliffe added.

In contrast to Hinchcliffe, Forrester VP and principal analyst Charlie Dai pointed out that while vibe coding tools will more likely be cheaper than hiring a developer for proof-of-concepts (PoCs) and software with simple business logic, the cumulative cost of tools and the necessary senior oversight needed for complex, large-scale projects for enterprises might approach or exceed the value of hiring a developer.

How can CIOs control expenditure?

Given that pricing of vibe coding tools is expected to remain sticky at current levels and CIOs are always looking to do more with constrained resources, analysts see a few ways to control cost.

“In my view, there are three levers for cost control — driving usage discipline, ensuring the right model selection for the right task, and using procurement leverage for buying at scale,” Hinchcliffe said.

“Configuring assistants to intervene only where value is highest and choosing smaller, faster models for common tasks and saving large-model calls for edge cases could bring down expenditure,” Hinchcliffe added.

Other analysts, such as Forrester’s Dai, note that enterprises are using innovative techniques to control costs.

“Companies can embrace prompt and context engineering optimization, leverage free tiers for experimentation, and adopt a hybrid approach where vibe coding handles prototyping while traditional coding handles complex production work,” Dai said.

However, The Futurum Group’s lead of the data intelligence and analytics practice, Bradley Shimmin, warned that vibe coding tools may keep getting more expensive for a given enterprise as their codebase expands.