Purchasing JetBrains AI Assistant from Low-Price Regions

JetBrains charges USD 10/month for AI Assistant in the US store—steep. The China store currently offers 50% off, albeit with Alibaba Cloud-backed AI if you connect directly. With a little region juggling and a proxy, you can pay China-store pricing while keeping the JetBrains-hosted AI service.

Change your JetBrains account region

Visit https://account.jetbrains.com/profile-details and set your country to China.

As of this writing JetBrains lets you switch countries multiple times—no hard limit observed.

Subscribe via the China site

Pricing follows the country on your account, so confirm the change before purchasing. The current monthly price is ¥41.

https://www.jetbrains.com.cn/ai/#plans-and-pricing

Check your license

Visit https://account.jetbrains.com/licenses to confirm the AI Assistant subscription.

If your JetBrains account belongs to an organization (e.g., an open-source license pool), grant AI Assistant access to the members explicitly.

Enable the plugin inside the IDE

1. Install the JetBrains AI Assistant plugin.
2. Activate the license. If the IDE reports an invalid license, deactivate and reactivate—it will refresh against your account.

Route the IDE through a proxy

To access the JetBrains-hosted models, the IDE must go through a proxy. Without the proxy it falls back to the China-region Alibaba Cloud models.

• Surge users can reuse my consolidated AI rule set: https://github.com/alanhe421/surge-config/blob/main/rules/AI.rule
• For other tools, proxy at least the following domain:

api.app.prod.grazie.aws.intellij.net

Troubleshooting

Error: “Your access to AI Assistant could not be verified.”

1. Confirm your subscription is active.
2. Verify the proxy is working.
3. For organization accounts, ensure the member permissions include AI Assistant.

Notes

• Because subscriptions auto-renew, consider canceling renewal immediately or avoid changing your region again; renewal happens at the current region’s price, which might not include the discount. I disabled auto-renew while testing.

Final Thoughts

• This approach lets you pay the lower China-store price while tapping into the global JetBrains AI backend—a neat bit of arbitrage.
• That said, the JetBrains AI Assistant still lags tools like Cursor: weaker interactions and no Claude models. It’s better than nothing, but manage expectations.