Current Pricing/Performance Balance - Product Direction?

Discussion
1

This is not meant to be a rant, but a question about the product direction. TLDR: The balance between

  • Cursor’s context optimization/token reduction
  • Slow pool response times and
  • Usage based pricing

is a strong disincentive to continue using Cursor for me and potentially others. Is this pricing/performance balance intended, or is it due to temporary resource constraints?

Context:
I have coding experience from a professional background, but not in the language I am using for my pet project (JS/TS). I use composer iteratively (create implementation plans, create code and iterate).

Today’s situation was

  • Slow pool response times are too long (2 to 3 mins for each request).
  • I bought usage based pricing with a cap of 20USD.
  • I executed an implementation plan for well defined topic (Moving from spaghetti test helpers to a structured approach with resource tracker, dependency cleanup, etc). Composer was “97 of 100” clear to execute the plan successfully.
  • Mistakes happen. I have indications that Composer was optimizing the Tokens of the plan and files that I provided too aggressively and made implementation shortcuts.
  • To remove those shortcuts and resulting mistakes I iterated and burned through 107 requests ($4,28) in three hours.

In principle this is fine, but the financial aspect is not sustainable if this is the permanent balance. Available alternatives are all sub-optimal for me as hobbyist/enthusiast:

  1. Continue with unpredictable usage costs
  2. Split development between Cursor and Claude (via MCP)
  3. Limit Composer usage to complex functions only, accepting 5-minute response times

I reckon that the options might work for other personas (like a ‘better’ developer or a corporate engineer who does not pay on his own).

So - as mentioned above - Is this pricing/performance balance intended, or is it due to temporary resource constraints?

PS: If this was a test to evaluate the willingness to pay of your users, it worked for me (Kudos, btw.). However, it worked only until I realized that to get to my desired outcome I need to pay an unpredictable amount of usage fees or really learn JS.

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