For me it helps that back when xAI was the new hotness, after reading HN comments constantly advertising the free Grok credits they were giving out each month for developers with data sharing enabled, I eventually set aside my personal distaste figuring I might as well take advantage for Cline/Roo Code.

I opened a developer API account, loaded 5 dollars and got the free $100s of credits for the month. Like two weeks later, xAI announced they were shutting down the subsidized credits entirely lol. Didn’t even get a full month out of it, and closed my account entirely since I sure wasn’t ever going to put another penny of my own money in.

So my personal lesson was to ignore any hype about the latest “crazy value / unbeatable / free / subsidized X, Y or Z” from anything xAI/Elon adjacent in the future.

These days I get more than enough personal usage from Codex + OpenCode Go to put up with yet another xAI/Cursor offer treadmill, especially if it involves installing new tooling to get it.