Trae by ByteDance
AI-native IDE from ByteDance
Overview
ByteDance's VS Code-fork AI IDE with agentic SOLO mode, codebase chat and MCP support, now on macOS, Windows and Linux. The launch-era free ride is over — token-based paid plans run $3–$100/month, though the free tier and $10 Pro still undercut Cursor and Windsurf.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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/month
- Limited SOLO access
- 2 concurrent cloud tasks
- $5 usage balance
- Unlimited autocomplete
- Fast queue priority
- $20 usage balance
- SOLO mode included
- 10 concurrent cloud tasks
- 7-day free trial
- $90 usage balance
- 3.5x Pro usage
- 15 concurrent cloud tasks
- $400 usage balance
- 20x Pro usage
- Model early access
- 20 concurrent cloud tasks
Use cases
What you can produce with Trae by ByteDance
- Scaffold a full-stack web application (frontend, backend, and configuration files) from a single natural-language prompt using SOLO Builder mode, then review the live preview before applying changes
- Switch between Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, DeepSeek R1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro within the same IDE session to compare model outputs on an identical code task (Claude 4 and GPT-4.1 available on paid tiers)
- Connect the Figma MCP integration and paste a design screenshot directly into the chat to have Trae generate the corresponding HTML, CSS, or React component from the visual layout
- Chat with the codebase-aware assistant to locate, explain, and refactor code across multiple files without specifying file paths manually
- Describe a bug in plain language and let the SOLO agent run terminal commands, read error logs, apply patches, and verify the fix in a live preview — repeating the loop until the error clears
- Create a custom agent within Trae by configuring a system prompt, assigning MCP servers, and scoping built-in tools, then persist it as a reusable workflow step for a recurring development task
- Access the SOLO Web browser IDE (invite-based early access as of mid-2026) to prototype a project without a local install, then download or continue work in the desktop version
ASEAN Perspective
Trae by ByteDance 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).
Nothing else this cheap does this much. Trae's $10 Pro plan includes the SOLO agent (a standalone app since March 2026), unlimited autocomplete and frontier-model access, and native Linux builds finally shipped in March 2026 alongside macOS and Windows. The February 2026 switch to token-based billing made heavy agent sessions harder to predict, and the plan ladder now stretches to a $100 Ultra tier. The unavoidable caveat is ByteDance: researchers documented heavy telemetry traffic even with the toggle off, and the terms allow five-year data retention after account closure — a dealbreaker for proprietary codebases, tolerable for side projects. Context handling also degrades on large repos. The best-value agentic IDE for cost-conscious developers; the wrong tool for sensitive code.
What people say
Ten dollars a month buys roughly what Cursor charges twenty for, and that arithmetic is most of Trae's pitch. ByteDance's VS Code fork holds around 4.7/5 on Product Hunt, with the SOLO agent mode — spun out as a standalone app on March 31, 2026 — the most-cited feature: describe a project in plain language and it scaffolds the full stack. Frontier-model access on cheap tiers is a genuine differentiator, and the long-standing Linux gap finally closed on March 19, 2026 with .deb/.rpm builds at feature parity with macOS and Windows.
The pricing model changed on February 24, 2026: fixed request counts gave way to token-based usage balances across five tiers — Free, Lite ($3), Pro ($10), Pro+ ($30) and Ultra ($100). The value is still strong, but heavy SOLO and Builder sessions now produce unpredictable burn, a complaint that shows up consistently on Reddit and in the developer forums.
The privacy file is the serious one. Security firm Unit 221B (March 2025) and The Register (July 2025) documented Trae making roughly 500 network calls and shipping up to 26 MB per seven-minute session even with the telemetry toggle disabled, and ByteDance's terms permit data retention for five years after account closure. A Privacy Mode exists, but for proprietary or client code most reviewers say look elsewhere. Add the usual agentic weakness — context loss on big repos, confident claims of fixes that didn't land — and the verdict settles: exceptional value for personal and experimental work, hard to justify where the code matters more than the subscription savings. The team has also open-sourced trae-agent, an MIT-licensed research agent with 11k+ GitHub stars.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Trae by ByteDance's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Trae by ByteDance 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.
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