Feature request for product/service
Billing
The ability to prepay for credit to be used on on-demand API usage
Google recently announced that they will allow users to prepay for API usage, which will help make monthly billing more predictable. I’m curious to know whether there is any way to do this in Cursor. If not, is it planned for a future release, or would it be possible to add?
I understand that on-demand usage with limits already exists, but sometimes I have extra money that I did not use towards other AI subscriptions that I would like to spend on Cursor without having to wait until the billing cycle date to come around to know how much I am going to be spending. For instance, this month I decided to cancel Claude Code, which left me with an extra $100 in my budget for AI tools. Since I had already planned for that money to be spent, it would be great to be able to spend it in Cursor by being able to purchase additional API usage credit so users can use a different payment method and know how exactly much they on-demand usage they can use without having to wait until the end of the cycle to see the total charges. Similar services where you can pay for usage upfront exist, such as OpenRouter. But, OpenRouter does not work well with Cursor, so that option is not really feasible.
Enabling on-demand billing exists and limits are easy to adjust, but the biggest issue is having to wait until the next billing cycle to pay for the on-demand usage along with combining charges for on-demand usage with the monthly subscription making billing unpredictable from month to month. For those with strict monthly budgets, this makes dealing with on-demand usage a pain point.
For example, if I realize halfway through a month of heavier-than-normal usage that I will need more to get me to my monthly reset, I would like the option to pay for API usage credits that estimated immediately, ahead of the billing date. Then, if the credit is not fully utilized, the remaining API usage credit could roll over so that users can put them towards the on-demand usage for the next billing cycle. That would make it much easier to predict how much you are spending month to month.
I recognize that I may be an edge case, since only a small subset of users probably budget for AI tools and subscriptions this way, but I believe both users and Cursor could greatly benefit from allowing customers to prepay for usage, which is probably why Google decided to introduce this for their API.