It's cheap, the ai features cost about half of what other editors are charging ($10/mo) and the free tier has generous limit. I guess you pay the difference with something else :)

I’m one of those who use it—mainly because it’s cheap, as others have mentioned. I wish Cursor offered a more generous limit so I wouldn’t need another paid subscription. But it won’t. So Trae comes in — fulfilling that need and sealing the deal. This is what we call competition: it brings more freedom and helps everyone get what they want. Kudos to the competition!

I'm not defending Trae’s telemetry — just pointing out the hard truth about why pricing works and why many people care less about privacy concerns (all because there are no better alternatives for them, considering the price.)

By the way, for those who care more about pricing($7.5/M) — here you go: https://www.trae.ai/. It’s still not as good as Cursor overall (just my personal opinion), but it’s quite capable now and is evolving fast — they even changed their logo in a very short time. Maybe someday it could be as competitive as Cursor — or even more so.

> Why would anyone use a "Bytedance VSCode fork" is beyond me

Because the person using it works at Bytedance.

I guess your question is better phrased as: “Why would any non-Bytedance employee use Bytedance VSCode fork?”, to which I have no answer.

Except their own employees, of course. Apparently the main difference this has with MS' version is additional "AI features", so I'm not surprised...