Published: Dec 2, 2025 by Isaac Johnson
Recently, from a TLDR newsletter I discovered Warp.
Now, there are a lot of AI coding startups now, but what caught my eye were two things:
- a free tier (moderate requests, but I’ll take it)
- a windows client with brew
Setup
I can either download the fat client direct or use brew
Just as an experiment, I’ll try brew
seems that is just for the Mac users.
the Windows download raises an eyebrow
update: I tried again in November, that first attempt above being in Sept, and still it shows Unverified
Setup took a bit, but on the last step we can launch
I’m now prompted to Signup
I always like flows that let me use an existing federated credential system like Github and Google
There is a little survey
Now I’m in the app
Note: if enough time passes and you open the app again, it will prompt you for updates
Clicking “Create new project” gives some suggested prompts
let’s see how it handles a status page for Vikunja tasks. I’ll give it the docs URL to see if it can sort that out
It was taking a while so I stopped recording after 7m above.. but at some point it noticed and suggested i get notifications when the agent needs me
It completed after about 10 minutes and used “10.6 credits”
Let’s test it. I’ll open in VS Code and look at the example .env
I’ll need a nice long lived Read Only API token we can use
My NodeJS environment in native windows seems to be missing npm. Warp wanted me to reinstall NodeJS but I would rather not.
Instead, I’ll try this from WSL
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:~$ cd /mnt/c/Users/isaac/projects/vikunja-status-page/
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:/mnt/c/Users/isaac/projects/vikunja-status-page$ nvm use lts/jod
Now using node v22.20.0 (npm v10.9.3)
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:/mnt/c/Users/isaac/projects/vikunja-status-page$ npm install
added 62 packages, and audited 63 packages in 13s
7 packages are looking for funding
run `npm fund` for details
2 moderate severity vulnerabilities
To address all issues (including breaking changes), run:
npm audit fix --force
Run `npm audit` for details.
npm notice
npm notice New major version of npm available! 10.9.3 -> 11.6.3
npm notice Changelog: https://github.com/npm/cli/releases/tag/v11.6.3
npm notice To update run: npm install -g npm@11.6.3
npm notice
builder@DESKTOP-QADGF36:/mnt/c/Users/isaac/projects/vikunja-status-page$
I fired it up, and the page loads, but has an error getting tasks
Let’s see if Warp.dev can sort out the cross origin scripting error - that worked!
The page loads, but I realized in its current state, it would show the requestors email address and I’m not sure folks would really like that
I should note that at this point we’ve used 33 credits
I then asked Warp to handle that
That worked great!
Credits
I found if you click the credits text, it has a drop down to show detailed usage
I can also see credit usage in the Billing and Usage plan
I have no idea how much I have remaining so I’ll just keep going. I do know that referrals can generate some free credits so I wouldn’t mind if you signed up using this link.
containerizing
let’s see how Warp handles docker containers. If anything, this would eliminate the need for WSL as the docker build would handle it.
Before I do anything more, it’s a good time to commit code.
I’ll now ask it to make the Dockerfile
I was pleasantly surprised that it noticed I had changed topics. That is, it knew my debug and UI tweaks were part of the initial thread, but now it registered we are doing something else. It then prompted me to start a new conversation:
I carefully reviewed the dockerfile and between the multi-step build and the dockerignore file, it would not pick up my local .env .
As we can see, that page has an error
I’ll be as clear as possible when I ask warp.dev for help:
it has an idea…
However, boom - we hit the limit of the free tier
If we lookup my usage:
We can see that I have used 80.6 credits so I might logically assume we get 80 a month in the free tier (though a specific is never listed on the site).
update: i later checked ‘overview’ instead of Usage and see i was to get 75, so i guess i got graced 5 extra
Upgrade / Plans
Let’s look at what the paid plans give us:
we can see they used to have a $10/month plan that had 250 credits with reloads:
The linked post from Oct 30th 2025 also notes what I suspected on free credits:
Are there free AI credits available?
“Yes, new logged-in users receive 150 AI credits per month for their first two months on the Free plan, and 75 AI credits per month afterward.”
I’m not upset - it’s their business - but I do think they are missing a large audience that finds $10/mo palatable but $20/mo a bit much for yet-another-service.
Additionally, what about the free users, like myself, that would gladly, right now, throw them a fiver or even ten just to “top up”. I do not want to subscribe, however.
Appearance
We can do things like tweak the opacity and set a variety of themes
MCP Servers
We can also add MCP servers from a URL. I briefly saw a marketplace style listing of MCP servers, but when I went back to review, they were gone and I couldn’t bring them up again.
Features
There are a whole lot of features to tweak in Warp. Two that stood out to me was middle button paste (as an old IRIX guy, this UNIX approach harkens to my early days and I love middle mouse paste) and turning off the damn bell
We can also adjust our graphics backend
For those on laptops that need to push battery life, dropping to Vulkan would let us use a more efficient API that reduces CPU overhead.
Company
Warp.dev was formed in 2020 and started getting seed round funding the same year. The last major funding was a Series B VC funding of $50 in 2023 with Sequoia Capital.
I should point out it was just in 2024 they rolled out a Linux client and just this year, a Windows one.
It was founded by Zach Lloyd who was Interim CTO at Time at the time. He posts quite a lot to LI still.
The company is privately held, so it’s hard to know exact size, but Crunchbase puts them at 50-100 employees presently.
Summary
There is a lot to like with Warp.dev, at least with my small test. It functions quite well, albeit maybe not the fastest. I won’t fault speed when I’m using a free tier, though.
It really worked well including setting things like a .gitignore to avoid my created .env file which was a bit of polish I had not expected. I liked how it detected new conversations and made it clear what my usage was. I basically completed this app, minus the last mile with dockerfiles, CICD and Kubernetes using 80 credits. If the monthly allotment is 1500, that would be just a tad over 5% of a monthly allotment.
I suppose my only (minor) nitpick is that they do not have a pay-as-you-go model nor a cheaper $10 model. I had a similar complaint a couple weeks back about SumoLogic - its lowest (usable) tier just put it beyond the small company/hobbyist level.
I’m going to come back to Warp.dev later in December and try it some more. There are just so many features I have yet to explore.
1-800-collect
Okay, let me pivot for a moment. There was a time that we didn’t all have cell phones. I was a teen in the 90s and I would say, for a brief time around 1992-1995 we all got cheap pagers. However, to call back, we had to use a payphone – and there were a lot of ways to game that. There were a plethora of 1-800 collect numbers (of course 1-800-collect and call ATT being the main ones) that you just needed to listen to a couple of adverts to make a call.
None of us were paying for these calls, mind you, we all just operated on the free tier and danced between collect card numbers, or gamed it with messages.
I’m having this kind of Deja-Vu with GenAI coding suites. There are so many now that have a small, but usable, free tier that I think the cost-focused of society are going to gather up the Claude, Gemini, Copilot Free-tier, and Warp instances and just switch between free-credit windows – at least for now.
For what its worth, cell phones got cheap in 95 and we ditched pagers and all got phones - the next way they tried to really monetize was text message plans - until we all got smartphones with internet.
At some point, GenAI will be a commodity and something else will be the hotness (maybe full stack private clouds, or hardware will get interesting again and you get GenAI with the new Apple AiBook or whatever).
But for now, even if you don’t chose to pay for Warp.dev, keep it as another great free-tier GenAI coding tool until they either get acquired, go paid-only, or disappear.
