Saturday, 5th July 2025
Cursor: Clarifying Our Pricing. Cursor changed their pricing plan on June 16th, introducing a new $200/month Ultra plan with "20x more usage than Pro" and switching their $20/month Pro plan from "request limits to compute limits".
This confused a lot of people. Here's Cursor's attempt at clarifying things:
Cursor uses a combination of our custom models, as well as models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. For external models, we previously charged based on the number of requests made. There was a limit of 500 requests per month, with Sonnet models costing two requests.
New models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks. Though most users' costs have stayed fairly constant, the hardest requests cost an order of magnitude more than simple ones. API-based pricing is the best way to reflect that.
I think I understand what they're saying there. They used to allow you 500 requests per month, but those requests could be made against any model and, crucially, a single request could trigger a variable amount of token spend.
Modern LLMs can have dramatically different prices, so one of those 500 requests with a large context query against an expensive model could cost a great deal more than a single request with a shorter context against something less expensive.
I imagine they were losing money on some of their more savvy users, who may have been using prompting techniques that sent a larger volume of tokens through each one of those precious 500 requests.
The new billing switched to passing on the expense of those tokens directly, with a $20 included budget followed by overage charges for tokens beyond that.
It sounds like a lot of people, used to the previous model where their access would be cut off after 500 requests, got caught out by this and racked up a substantial bill!
To cursor's credit, they're offering usage refunds to "those with unexpected usage between June 16 and July 4."
I think this highlights a few interesting trends.
Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor which are way past demonstrating product-market fit.
Secondly, that $200/month plan for 20x the usage of the $20/month plan is an emerging pattern: Anthropic offers the exact same deal for Claude Code, with the same 10x price for 20x usage multiplier.
Professional software engineers may be able to justify one $200/month subscription, but I expect most will be unable to justify two. The pricing here becomes a significant form of lock-in - once you've picked your $200/month coding assistant you are less likely to evaluate the alternatives.