I’ve been a happy Cursor user for a while now, and I’m on the Ultra plan ($200/mo). As I’m approaching my monthly API limit more frequently, I wanted to start a thoughtful discussion about what makes the most sense when we hit that ceiling.
The Situation
When you exhaust your Ultra plan’s ~$200 API credit, you have two main options:
Enable pay-as-you-go and continue in Cursor at raw API rates (losing the 2x value bundled in the plan)
Switch to Claude Code Max 20x ($200/mo) for the remainder of the month, which gives you 200-800 prompts per 5-hour window with access to Opus 4.5
Why This Matters
With the recent release of Claude Opus 4.5 (now available in both platforms), this question has become more relevant. Opus 4.5 is 3x cheaper than the previous Opus 4.1 and performs exceptionally well in Cursor. However, when we exceed our Ultra allocation and pay-as-you-go kicks in(I get to the ceiling roughly within the 1/3rd days in a months), we’re essentially paying full price without the subscription discount.
I’m able to work on several projects for 8 hours a day or more on the $200 plan.
You likely need to review your available models, clean up or add quality cursor rules and learn to ask more direct questions and have smaller overall agent convos per task.
If you are not a developer you may find it challenging to ask the right questions or prevent it from going down a over engineered rabbit hole.. but if you are a dev, the previous suggestions should prevent you from limitations.
Plan mode helps save time and money too. It engineers very specific and organized prompts for the agent to complete efficiently too. Just make sure you don’t make the plans too large. Try to keep your total context window less than 75% while in agent mode, if you reach that, start a new plan to finish what is not complete and start the plan in a new agent.
I’ve stopped pasting screenshots / chrome console errors out of laziness, and started to copy and paste just text instead which has helped somewhat helped to minimise context windows
I’ve also started to do some mundane refactors myself too e.g. renaming things if I feel a task is going to be quite expensive.
Alternatively I just use the Auto model which while not free, is a lot less than Composer-1.
Like most things in the AI-assisted coding world, I can’t be 100% sure but I tend to get to the end of the % a lot later in the month than I used to. I too have noticed the pinch across the last couple of months.