I renewed my Trae Pro subscription for one reason: access to the latest overseas models, supposedly at real speed gains. Four months in, there’s exactly one thing that’s fast — how quickly my patience ran out.

Slow model updates. Slow response times. Slowest of all: getting anyone at Trae to acknowledge either problem.

I’m not making this up, and I’m not the only one saying it. Trae’s own Chinese-language community forum has a thread asking flat out when the international version will get new models — users pointing out it’s several generations behind. On GitHub, one Pro subscriber opened an issue titled “Pro subscription has none of the mainstream models, no response from official team”. A Pro+ user posted a two-week review calling the new international pricing flat-out overpriced. None of these are old threads sitting there for years. They’re recent, which tells you the problem isn’t a bad week — it’s the baseline.

Then there’s the stuff that used to work and doesn’t anymore. Auto-generating a Git commit message — about as basic a feature as an AI IDE can ship — throws the same error often enough that it has its own recurring thread on the forum and multiple open GitHub issues with the identical message: “Git commit content generation exception, please try again later.” A community member even put together a megathread compiling reported bugs and feature requests because there were too many scattered complaints for anyone to track individually. When your users start doing your bug triage for you, that’s not a good sign.

The part that actually got me writing this is the refund process, or the absence of one. Scroll through Trae’s GitHub issues and you’ll find a steady drip of refund requests: someone charged for a subscription renewal they say they never triggered, someone else asking for their money back the same day they were charged, another requesting a refund after their region got locked out of the models they’d already paid for. These aren’t one-off mistakes filed and closed. New ones keep showing up, days apart. That’s the real story — not that billing errors happen, but that nobody’s closing the loop on them.

Here’s the thing about a coding tool: its entire pitch is the model behind it. If that model stops improving, everything downstream — code quality, task success rate, whether the thing is worth opening over a competitor — degrades with it. That’s the one input Trae can’t fake with a UI refresh or a pricing page redesign. And when the core product stalls out, customer support is the only thing standing between “disappointed” and “gone.” Right now that backstop isn’t showing up either.

So here’s what I actually want to say to Trae: I didn’t pay an annual fee for a roadmap. I paid for models that keep pace. If the overseas version isn’t a priority anymore — if it’s quietly being wound down — say so, and refund the people still on the hook for it. Don’t leave them checking their inbox for a reply that isn’t coming. You’re allowed to deprioritize a product line. You’re not allowed to keep charging for it while doing neither the updates nor the refunds.

I know this reads angry. It is. It’s the accumulated weight of refund emails that went nowhere and changelog entries that never showed up. What I want out of publishing this is small: an actual public statement — what the model update plan is, and when the refund requests that have been sitting for weeks will get processed. Not a lot to ask for something people are paying for every year.