Warp Tried to Sell Me AI Again
I downloaded Warp on a Thursday afternoon.
The hype was everywhere — every terminal thread had someone saying “try Warp, it’s the future.” A terminal built for the modern era. GPU-accelerated rendering. Smart autocomplete. AI built into the command line.
I was still raw from leaving Copilot. Quitting that felt like breaking a default — comfortable even when it was wrong. I needed something that worked differently. Not a better autocomplete. A fundamentally different approach to how AI lived in my terminal.
The first launch hit different. Neon output. Integrated IDE-like blocks. A command palette that actually made sense. I spent an hour tweaking themes, running commands, feeling the speed. The rendering was buttery. The layout respected my screen.
Then I opened the AI assistant.
It was fast. Inline completions appearing before I finished typing. Natural language for find and awk commands I could never hold in my head. The assistant could explain errors, rewrite commands, write little scripts. I felt the pull — maybe this was the one.
Then I hit the pricing page.
The AI features needed the Build plan — $20/month at the time — for anything beyond a handful of trial credits. Monthly. On top of everything else.
I closed the settings panel and sat with the disappointment.
It wasn’t the dollar amount — twenty bucks is lunch. It was the pattern. Leave one AI subscription, find another. GitHub trained on user data. Copilot was included in my existing subscription. Warp wanted me to pay extra for a terminal with AI bolted on.
Same model. Different package.
I uninstalled it that evening. Not angry — tired. Tired of being sold AI as a subscription. Tired of every tool becoming a platform with pricing tiers. Tired of my development environment turning into someone else’s revenue stream.
I didn’t know then that Warp would transform. Months later, the company announced the Agentic Development Environment — not just a smarter terminal, but a platform where agents were first-class citizens. Custom OpenAI-compatible providers. Child agent orchestration. MCP integration. Then came Oz: the run_agents primitive, cloud environments, audit trails. Everything the first version had promised but couldn’t deliver, rebuilt from scratch.
That came much later though. After OpenCode. After 9router. After I stopped looking for a product others had built and started assembling my own stack.
At that moment, on that Thursday afternoon, I just saw another subscription.
I walked away.
See Why I Left GitHub Copilot for what sent me searching. See OpenCode: The $10/mo TUI for what I found instead.
Sources: Warp pricing page (Build plan $20/mo, 1,500 credits/month) · Warp pricing announcement (December 2025 — Build plan intro, BYOK support)