While updating my Chrome extension to include a summary of total costs for the current billing month (because I suspect the burst limit duration may be much longer than expected), I got rate limited for the first time. The message said:
“You’ve saved $128 on API modal usage this month with Pro.”
Haha, the extension also shows $127.91 — a perfect match!
So it’s clear that Cursor calculates total usage monthly. The burst limit doesn’t just last a few days; based on feedback from other users, it likely lasts weeks, even though the documentation only mentions that it “refills slowly.” It seems the refill rate may be extremely slow — possibly resetting only at the start of the next billing cycle.
In my case, it took just 10 days to use up all the limits. But I did use Opus several times and ran Sonnet-4-Thinking (max mode) quite heavily.
You can find the updated extension (including source code and PRD) here:
GitHub - xiangz19/cursor_usage_detail: A chrome extension to show cursor usages with compute costs
Edit: I forgot to mention — the Cursor dashboard was just updated to show token usage (though the cost is still hidden and only appears on hover). Perfect timing! This makes it possible for me to update the extension to fetch all event data for the current billing cycle.
Big thanks to the Cursor team!
That said, I still hope the dashboard continues to improve — ideally to the point where third-party extensions aren’t needed at all.
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Hey, my friend, outstanding work on the extension! I’ve already starred your repo on GitHub.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on these forums lately, even had some back-and-forth with the Cursor staff, and I’d like to offer a different perspective based on my experience.
You pointed out this message:
I don’t believe this message indicates that we’ve hit a monthly spending cap. I see it more as a descriptive marketing banner simply telling you how much value the new plan has provided. I actually like the new plan—it has genuinely saved me a lot of money—but this type of messaging, while common in my country, might be less so elsewhere because of its… subtly deceptive nature.
To share my own staggering usage as a data point: I’m currently at $861 in computed costs. If there were a hard cap, I should have been blocked weeks ago.
However, I only started experiencing this rate limit issue three days ago. Coincidentally, that’s when a flood of similar posts started appearing on the forums.
This leads me to a different theory, based on your findings, my own experience, and the timing of these events:
The Rate Limit is likely a temporary, concurrency-based issue, not a hard monthly cap.
My thinking is:
- It probably originates from the upstream API provider (Anthropic) during peak usage hours.
- When the API is overloaded, users are put into a queue, and we experience this “rate limit” until the peak demand subsides.
- This would explain why, even after my
$861 usage, I can still get a few Claude Opus calls in after resting for a night, before hitting the limit again.
This is both good news and bad news:
- The Good: It means it’s not a hard spending limit that cuts you off for the rest of the month.
- The Bad: It means the limit is completely opaque and highly random, which makes it impossible to plan for.
Sharing this for our mutual understanding and continued investigation. Cheers.
Wait, maybe we’re both right.
Cursor just said that $861 and $128 is the cost in Grace Period. The real usage limit is $20, maybe worth 225 requests of sonnet 4 or 550 requests of Gemini 2.5 pro.
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Thanks for sharing. According to the latest update from Cursor, I might not receive $128 in usage for future months. Still, it’s good to see unlimited auto (GPT-4.1) with the new pricing. I just updated the extension to add caching and paging with the auto model—auto seems to work well for these simple tasks.
Now that the policy is quite clear, I think Cursor should improve the dashboard right away to show the total costs for the current billing month. That way, we wouldn’t need extensions anymore.
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I just see the new Subscription Usage Summary on the dashboard, thanks.
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