Antigravity lost me in 30 seconds, after an incredible first day.
I loved it so much, I closed Cursor immediately… blackhat manipulation techniques, & bad payment flows, lost me in seconds.
tl;dr: The best product can still lose if you ask for money in the wrong way. Antigravity had the best UX, and codegen skills I’ve seen. I used them non-stop for 2 days. In 30 seconds, they lost me with unpredictable credit limits, a 4 day lockout, and broken payment flows.
Friday afternoon I decided to work on a fun project. For a long time, I’ve been experimenting with gamifying my day-to-day work experience. That’s how the idea for swipe.desplega.sh came to be. I wanted a simple app to swipe through my issue tracker, deciding what I would dismiss, mark as WAI, or assign to claude-code… ehmmm, I meant myself.
That’s when I recalled a convo with a Googler that pushed me to try Antigravity. He was vigorously telling me it was exactly what we used back in the day. As a Xoogler the temptation was too big not to try it. And it was amazing. It took me 10 minutes from nothing to having a proof-of-concept.
I’m not big at planning, neither letting my agents run wild, however they prompted me in the right time to check their inbox feature, and it was a game changer. Suddenly I was writing plans, reviewing them, and adding key features I had never thought of before. But it didn’t stop there, they also detected related repos & configurations while using the inbox, which immediately made it so I started developing important things there.
After 1hr, I had closed Cursor, I was sharing the news with some friends, and I was convinced from now on I would only use Antigravity. I was wrong.
First: Flawless Onboarding
The biggest blocker I find lately to test new solutions is cognitive. It takes an hour to set up, a day to see some ROI, and a week to feel I’m productive. That has been my experience with GTM (rb2b, ahrefs, vidIQ, etc) and Tech tools (Claude CLI, Gemini CLI & OpenCode.ai) alike. Only 10% became tools I rely on, doesn’t matter how hard I try.
From the start, Antigravity felt different. It didn’t ask me for anything other than a folder, my repo, and then it naively suggested in a pop-up that I try their inbox functionality. The plot twist? I didn’t check it. Instead it creeped in when I received the first notification after planning.
The inbox experience was game-changer. Notifications worked like a charm, and commenting on plans was natural. It was during those planning sessions that it kept discovering other repos, and added them to my inbox. By the end, I was doing all my ‘coding’ from my ‘gmail inbox’, and it felt great.
By hour 3, I had closed all my Cursor windows, and I had decided I was going to use Antigravity moving forward. I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was being more productive, I knew I was.
Second: Surprisingly Delightful
Looking back, what really prompted me to close cursor was only ease of use, in two areas:
Inbox UX
Our current coding experience is closer to async reviewing of design documents than it is to chat with someone. The inbox concept recognizes how async the relationship with new IDEs is.
Cursor & others tried to embrace this new paradigm with moderate success, Antigravity is simply better.
Inbox with detected repos An effective collaborative agent, that reinforces (1)
During my first few hours, I didn’t really have to re-prompt much. Even when I had to comment on the planning, the implementation afterwards was good enough.
The truth is, I found some things I wasn’t entirely happy with, however, prompting for small fixes was enough. This delightful interactions completely shifted my previous experiences. Antigravity truly understood the type of solutions I was looking for.
You may ask yourself ‘how did I know it was better’? Truth is, last week I built a similar app with Cursor + Claude (https://www.desplega.ai/tools/flaky-or-fixable). Only the swiping took multiple iterations with that setup, and I’m still not happy with the results. In fact, I asked Antigravity to re-do that app, when…
Third: The blackhat wall
After 2 days of smooth sailing, Monday was here and I was looking forward to my Antigravity time. Suddenly, Antigravity decided I had run out of credits… and it did 3 things wrong:
Unpredictability.
I didn’t know I was running out of credits this fast. Actually, I thought I was being extra careful, using fast models for easy tasks and using planning sporadically.
I wasn’t prepared for a sudden lockout, it was frustrating.Artificial Scarcity
‘Your credits will reset on Nov 19th’, that was four days!! Now you are full on blackhat manipulation mode, yup I know the game. My question:
Why are you looking to generate negative feelings?
You got me defensive, and my brain will be looking for any excuse not to do it, and it got worse…Paying was friction-full
I had Cursor closed, a bunch of things I wanted to do, I was somewhat frustrated, but I thought ‘hey, I’ll cancel my Cursor subscription and that’s that’. Well, that’s when the fun started.No payment link
The note referred to a ‘X service subscription’, do I need all that? Why am I paying so much if I only need this. Well, ok, let me check the price.‘Not available for your business account’
Dude, really? I need to use my personal account? Ok…Yes! Upgrade to Google One for more…
How much more? I had learned my lesson from (1) & (2), I wasn’t going to become dependent on a scarce, opaque and unpredictable tool.
All of this happened in a span of 30 seconds, by the end I had Cursor opened again, and I was back with my old set up.
Blackhat techniques destroy in seconds loyalty that you built in days.
If they instead would have used whitehat techniques (‘Here you go, 2 more days on us’ or ‘Share it with this code and you get 2 months free’) my sentiment would have been the exact opposite to this one.
the one thing
Attention is the new currency, and loyalty is your moat.
Antigravity won me over, in just a few hours it had become my de-facto IDE. I had recommended it to colleagues & friends, I was ready to switch my GenAI subscriptions. However…
They destroyed all that trust in 30 seconds by showing they don’t respect their users’ time, or their end-to-end experience, when it matters most. They failed when it matters most.
For me, Monday 2:30pm, I was ready to pay. Their payment flow issues cost them not only my LTV, but they also ended up burning through their CAC for a shot at a quick buck.
How many others did they lose this week?