A few months ago, I was rooting for Cursor as an alternative to VSCode Copilot. But with these new, confusing pricing, Cursor is essentially unusable on the $20 Pro plan. This month I upgraded to Pro+ on VScode Copilot,and so I’ve been using VS Code exclusively, only turning to Cursor occasionally for a different perspective or to tackle tricky problems.
On average, I made about 3 requests per day using the Claude 4 “Sonnet” thinking model on Cursor. Then, last Wednesday on the 16, I had a message in the chat telling me that with my current usage I will probably be able to go to the 21 of this month without hiting my rate limit. I didn’t use it again until today, and now the 21, on my very first request, it prompts me that I have hit my rate limit and to switch to “auto mode.” It seams the average that it had given me last week was more like a deadline/hard limit not taking into account my usage, it’s so weird.
Even more frustrating, the dashboard claims I saved $59 this month when last month it said I’d saved $100. It’s completely inconsistent.
I get that models are costly especialy claude 4 sonnet thinking, what I’m complaining about is how obfuscate the rates are. It almost feel random, and what I’m saying is nothing new it’s the same thing we’ve been saying and complaining about since the new pricing was in place. It’s to shady for us the end user.
I’ve been using Cursor for a year and am still a subscriber, but.
The honeymoon is over.
Cursor heavily subsidized us at the $20 plan—and we got spoiled,—but I dare to say they couldn’t continue with that for longer, hence the pricing change.
My humble opinion as a fellow frustrated programmer: don’t waste your time and move on. Cursor today is nothing but a clunky LLM wrapper with sophisticated tab mechanism (the only reason I’m still a subscriber).
But manage your expectations, too: for $20, I doubt you’ll find any other tool that gives the same quality Cursor used to give us. That is, if you are looking for true agentic capabilities and vibe coding, you won’t find any (good) solution out there for $20.
And if anybody’s curious, IMHO, Cursor’s higher plans (Pro+ or Ultra) are not worth the money if compared to other solutions out there, such as Claude Code. I’ve been using it for a month now and won’t look back.
Unfortunately, they thought they could exploit us with the valuation they received and the investments from greedy investors. But as long as this ridiculous system continues, it’s going to be difficult. I’ve been using Trae for the past week, and the best feature is that you can design your own agent. Right now, it’s reached a level where I don’t even miss Cursor. The first month is $3, then $10 per month for 600 Claude 4 Sonnet.I definitely won’t be missing Cursor. So, it’s goodbye from me too.
I had a message I was getting close to my limit. I had my plan switched back to the old pricing model of 500 requests. I was at only 148/500 requests when it switched back. I’m still happy with Cursor as the 500 requests still seems like a great deal for those of us still able to stay on that plan.
Yeah, AI is expensive, and model prices will fluctuate depending on a variety of factors like electricity costs and availability. That’s why the idea of an “unlimited” plan is fundamentally. But that’s not really what I’m upset about, it’s more the bait and switch they pulled and the opaque rates they’ve set.
Good for them if the term “unlimited” brings in more customers, but they are losing reputation in the process.
