stagewise
Agentic coding IDE with full model sovereignty — frontier, open-weight or locally-run models, plus BYOK on the free tier
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stagewise.ioAbout stagewise
stagewise is an agentic IDE built around model sovereignty: the agent harness is theirs, but which model runs inside it is entirely your choice, including open-weight models and ones running on your own hardware. You can use stagewise Cloud Inference, bring your own key or an external subscription, or run inference locally, and there is a documented path for each of DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi and MiniMax — a pointed contrast with editors that quietly route everything through one frontier provider. The agent itself is tuned for the practical constraint of long agentic sessions: it maximises prompt-cache hit rates and dynamically controls what enters context, which is the difference between an agent that stays coherent across a multi-hour refactor and one that degrades once the window fills. It runs locally and connects out to whatever you point it at, so nothing about the workflow requires a hosted workspace. Pricing is unusually founder-friendly at the bottom: the Hobby tier is free with limited access to three standard model presets, and bring-your-own-key is available on that free tier for unlimited access and custom models — so a developer who already pays for model access can use stagewise indefinitely at no cost. The company is a German GmbH, Y Combinator-backed, and the enterprise tier offers EU-resident cloud inference plus optional self-hosting for teams with data-residency constraints.
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Key Features
stagewise Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- +BYOK on the free tier makes it genuinely free if you already pay for models
- +Open-weight and local inference support is a real hedge against provider lock-in
- +EU cloud inference and self-hosting address data-residency requirements directly
⚠️ Cons
- −Younger and less proven than the established AI IDEs
- −The free tier's three model presets are limited without your own key
- −Model sovereignty means you own the tuning and cost work too
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