For users spending $1,000-2,000/month on usage, is Ultra worth it over Pro + usage-based pricing?
I’m a heavy Cursor user spending approximately $1,000-2,000 per month, primarily using premium models like:
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (with extended thinking)
Max Mode
Other frontier models
I’m currently on Pro ($20/month) with usage-based pricing enabled, and I’m trying to understand if Ultra ($200/month) would provide any benefit for my usage pattern.
My understanding:
Pro: $20/month + $20 included usage credit + pay for overages at API rates
Ultra: $200/month + $400 included usage credit + pay for overages at API rates
My math:
Since I’m spending $1,000-2,000/month total, I’m way beyond even Ultra’s $400 included usage. So it seems like:
Pro: $20 + ~$980-1,980 in overages = ~$1,000-2,000 total
Ultra: $200 + ~$800-1,800 in overages = ~$1,000-2,000 total
This suggests I’d be paying an extra $180/month for Ultra’s base fee without actually benefiting from the 20x usage limit.
Questions:
Is my understanding correct?
Are there other benefits to Ultra beyond the usage credit that would justify it for power users? (Priority support, faster model access, etc.)
Would the Cursor team recommend Ultra for someone with my usage pattern, or should I stick with Pro + usage-based pricing?
The actual math for $1,000 worth of AI token usage:
Pro plan: $20 base + $980 usage = $1,000 total
Ultra plan: $200 base + $600 usage (because $400 is included for free) = $800 total for same amount of tokens, also not counting bonus usage we add!
So with Ultra, you save $200 every month compared to Pro at this spend level—that’s a 20% discount in the example. The savings happen because Ultra includes a much larger $400 usage credit each month + larger bonus usage than on Pro.
I saw a user somewhere on the forum who has 2-3 thousand dollars of paid usage and in addition to that, Ultra gave him as much as 504 dollars of the included quota.
Another thing to keep in mind, Cursor usually offers bonus usage, whenever the model provider will accommodate. I usually overrun my cursor Ultra plan, and I’m a heavy agent user (everything I do is with the agent now, although I am not the heaviest agent user by any means.) I usually get around a hundred bucks of bonus, and spend around a hundred bucks or so overage?
Because of the bonuses, its tough to nail down the exact savings, but, at the very least, you would have the ~$200 savings vs. Pro, PLUS whatever bonuses Cursor is also able to offer based on the model. I have had a lot higher bonuses with other models, but I do get them with Claude as well.
I use various models, including Grok Code, which as far as I know is still largely free, and I try to leverage that whenever I can for things that aren’t super-critical (its a decent coder, but after months of using a wide range of models, Claude Sonnet 4.5 is still superior for my usage patterns). There are other ways to save as well…there are often “stealth” models that are often free usage, and provide pretty darn good results, and you can leverage those for a lot of things as well (Cheetah, a recent stealth, was interesting…there were times when it was phenomenal and blazing fast, and times when it seemed to have an IQ of about 50…but in the times it was phenomenal, it REALLY WAS and did a ton of work.)