Trae
ByteDance's free AI IDE — capable agent mode, shaky privacy record
Overview
Trae is ByteDance's free, VS Code-based AI IDE — an agentic coding assistant with real-time completion, in-IDE project builds, and a dozen-plus switchable Chinese and open models (Doubao, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen). It dropped Claude access in late 2025 after Anthropic restricted China.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 12 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 5,000 autocompletions/mo
- 10 fast + 50 slow premium requests
- 2 concurrent cloud tasks
- $5 basic + bonus usage
- Unlimited autocomplete
- 2 concurrent cloud tasks
- $20 basic + bonus usage
- 10 concurrent cloud tasks
- 7-day free trial
- 3.5x the usage of Pro
- 15 concurrent cloud tasks
- 20x the usage of Pro
- 20 concurrent cloud tasks
- Early access to new models
What you can produce with Trae
- Real-time AI code completion
- Agent-based project builds with bug troubleshooting and preview
- TRAE SOLO standalone cloud-agent mode (desktop + web)
- Switchable model roster: Doubao, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax
- Open-sourced Trae-Agent CLI (MIT license, bytedance/trae-agent)
- VS Code-compatible extension support
- Free tier with 5,000 autocompletions/month
ASEAN Perspective
Trae in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Trae is ByteDance's most credible swing at an agent-native IDE, and being free changes the calculus versus Cursor or Windsurf subscriptions. The model roster is deep — Doubao, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax — switchable mid-session, and SOLO mode handles multi-file builds and bug fixes with real autonomy.
The catch is trust. Independent testing found the IDE phoning home hundreds of times in minutes even with telemetry switched off, transmitting hardware IDs, project data and usage patterns — and Trae's Discord reportedly auto-muted a user for typing the word "track." Add the loss of Claude access after Anthropic's China restrictions, and Trae reads as capable but not for anyone doing sensitive or client work. The free tier is fine for throwaway projects; treat it as untrusted software for anything else.
What people say
Product Hunt users rate Trae 4.7 out of 5 across 65 reviews, praising the polish of SOLO mode and value against pricier competitors — several reviewers specifically call out project-context handling and repetitive-task automation as strengths versus Cursor.
Trustpilot tells a rougher story: recurring complaints about payment processing, slow support responses, inconsistent code quality, and reliability. Hacker News threads picked apart an independent teardown of the desktop app: 6.3x the RAM footprint of vanilla VS Code (about 5.7GB), 3.7x the process count, and — after disabling telemetry — roughly 500 outbound calls to ByteDance servers in seven minutes, totaling around 26MB of hardware, OS and usage data. Cybernews and Neowin picked up the same findings. When one tester raised it on Trae's Discord, the word "track" reportedly triggered an automatic seven-day mute, a detail that did more damage to the story than the RAM numbers.
On the product side, Trae confirmed on Discord in November 2025 that it had dropped access to Anthropic's Claude models after Anthropic restricted China-based access, leaving the built-in roster to Doubao-Seed-Code, DeepSeek-V4, GLM-5, Kimi-K2, Qwen3-Plus and MiniMax variants — a wide spread, though missing the frontier Western models some Cursor and Windsurf users switch between. TRAE SOLO, a standalone agent mode with desktop and web builds, moved from invite-only testing to broader rollout through March 2026.
Pricing is genuinely competitive: the Free tier gives 5,000 autocompletions a month plus a small slow-request allowance, and Lite at $3/month is cheap for casual use. The core product — fast completions, a workable agent mode, zero cost of entry — is why it still gets recommended in vibe-coding roundups. The privacy findings are why those same roundups usually append a caveat about sandboxing it or avoiding it for proprietary codebases — and why some teams that liked the agent mode still uninstalled it once the telemetry teardown made the rounds.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Trae's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Trae unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Trae directly →
Spotted something out of date? Suggest an update →
More in Code & Dev Tools
