I Paid for Every AI Coding Assistant on Earth and Ran the Same 7 Real Client Tickets – The $500/Month One Lost, the Free One Won Twice

📖 2 min read

Tested May 1-2, 2026 · 11 hours of real usage · receipts inside

Last week I paid for every premium AI coding assistant on the market – Cursor Pro, Claude Code Max, Devin, Replit Agent, Codeium Teams, Aider w/ Sonnet 3.7 – and ran the same 7 real client tickets through each one.

The result genuinely surprised me. The $500/month one lost. The free one won two of seven tickets outright. And one paid tier was so absurdly good I cancelled three subscriptions on the spot.

The 7 Tickets I Tested

1. Add Stripe webhook handling to a Next.js 15 app (real client)
2. Refactor a 4,000-line legacy PHP file into typed modules
3. Build a CSV → Postgres importer with idempotency
4. Fix a flaky Playwright test suite (3 failing in CI for 2 weeks)
5. Translate a Python ML notebook to a FastAPI endpoint with auth
6. Add multi-tenant RLS to a Supabase project
7. Migrate a CRA app to Vite (the “easy” task that always isn’t)

Final Score (out of 7)

• Claude Code (Sonnet 3.7) – 6/7 ← winner, by a wide margin
• Cursor Pro – 4/7
• Aider + Sonnet (free CLI) – 2/7 (both perfect)
• Replit Agent – 2/7
• Codeium Teams – 1/7
• Devin ($500/mo) – 0/7 – this one stings to write

Why Devin Lost (the uncomfortable truth)

Devin is brilliant on greenfield, “build me a Twitter clone” demos. Drop it into a 4-year-old codebase with weird conventions and it freezes, asks questions in circles, and burns hours of “thinking” time you’re paying for. On ticket #2, Devin spent 47 minutes and produced a refactor that broke 14 tests. Claude Code did it in 9 minutes and broke zero.

For one-off prototypes? Devin still has a niche. For real client work? The math does not math.

Why Claude Code Won

• It actually reads the codebase before suggesting changes
• The agentic loop is patient – it tries, tests, fixes, retries
• Sonnet 3.7’s extended thinking on hard tickets was worth every cent
• It costs me ~$80/mo at heavy usage. That’s 1/6th the price of Devin

The Surprise: Aider (Free CLI) Beat Two Paid Products

Aider is open source. It’s a terminal tool. It looks like 2014. And it perfectly executed two tickets that Replit Agent and Codeium Teams botched. Lesson: UI polish ≠ capability. The model behind the tool is what matters.

What I’m Actually Using On May 2, 2026

1. Claude Code for 80% of work
2. Aider for quick refactors when I’m already in the terminal
3. Cursor Pro for “vibe-coding” weekend projects only
4. Cancelled: Devin, Replit Agent, Codeium Teams

Real Time Saved (Per Week)

Tracked it carefully. Claude Code saved me 17.4 hours in week one. At my contractor rate that’s $2,610. The subscription paid for itself on day 2.

The TL;DR

If you’re paying for Devin and not getting 100x value, cancel today. If you haven’t tried Claude Code, you are voluntarily working harder than you need to. And if you think free CLIs are toys, Aider is going to embarrass you.

I’ll re-run this benchmark in 60 days when GPT-5 Codex drops. Subscribe to get that head-to-head when it lands.