They never suggest alternatives. They just imply there are some cheaper products. If anything, alternatives like Trae and Kiro are cheaper, but that is probably just temporary, and from my experience they are not as effective IDEs. Cursor runs circles around the cheaper alternatives, unless you are looking to just vibe code, then Cursor probably is unecessary.
The cursor is just as you said. I found that my pay-per-request billing was secretly changed to pay-per-token billing by cursor without my knowledge. When I contacted cursor’s customer service to ask why, their AI assistant Sam resolved the issue by exhausting my patience instead of actually solving the problem.
Yea, they aren’t going to change your account back especially if you were on a monthly subscription.
I am available, hehe.
Ha ha, I thought Sam was a real person
Yes, you are correct.
It happened to me too.
The prices used to be so much lower.
As I see it, this is the Cursor’s glitch in their system.
And if they are not going to fix it, they will lose a lot of customers.
But for some reason, their team doesn’t want to fix this glitch.
They want to believe that the system is undeniable and charging everyone correctly.
I am telling you guys, this is the glitch, an error in the system that will kill your business if you do not fix it. 
And he was. But not anymore… 
He is forced to work as a bot 24/7 now.
Right but the whole point of auto was to find the right model, for the complexity of the request. I gave it a small task, with small context window and it cost 10 cents. That’s 200 of those per month. So you have a product now that could completely cut off the main feature before the end of the month. Imagine your cable getting cut off but you pay for a month’s worth. The reality is, you guys could still offer an auto version that is so cheat, that your enthusiast can offset that lost cash, but you don’t. This to me, makes this product unusable. It’s getting to a point where you might as well just to back to writing the code yourself.
Time to start using open code and some local LLMs.
It now is too expensive. Gave auto something today, super small, spat out a ton of tokens and cost 50 cents. So on pace for 40 requests this month! Canceling my subscription. Use open code and some local models. They’re starting to perform better!
Loving the troll
The only way “something small” will cost 50 cents is if:
- You make a ton of MCP calls or massive rules/agents files, which will always cost a bomb
- You’re passing in an absolutely massive file
- Auto has a bug and is using Opus 4.1
I use OpenCode and if a call to Cursor is costing you 50 cents, it’s going to cost you 50 cents via API costs on OpenCode. If you want cheap on OpenCode you will have to manually select a free model like Grok Code, Big Pickle, etc – the same process you would have to do in Cursor