Dear Cursor community,
This is my honest take on where Cursor currently stands and my personal experience with it. I’m not writing this to cry or shame anyone — you’re free to think whatever you want. I just want to share my story.
I’m a student. I can’t afford more than a Pro subscription. And I’ll admit it: I used Cursor’s free trial more than once. I know that’s not ideal, but when you genuinely can’t afford something and there’s a way to keep using it, you take it. Sure, someone might say, “Then don’t use it.” But that’s the reality for some of us.
Eventually, I decided to finally upgrade to Pro — the plan that promised unlimited agent requests. That’s what sold me. Of course, as many of us now know, we all misunderstood what “unlimited” really meant. And that’s when the mess started. Cursor eventually posted a clarification about the pricing model (Clarifying Cursor Pro Pricing), which helped a bit — but only after confusion had already spread.
To be fair, under the new pricing, I got a lot of value out of my Pro plan — over $300 worth of API calls for just $20. I can’t complain about that. Still, I wanted to understand what was happening after I hit an unexpected rate limit.
In the early days, using Claude 4, I was able to make around 500 requests a day without any issues. Then I took a short break. When I came back, there was a new update — and suddenly I was rate limited after just 40 requests. That caught me off guard.
When I originally paid, the plan said “unlimited” But after the update, I checked the docs and forums, and what I found was chaos. The documentation hadn’t been updated. No clear communication. And then I noticed the pricing page now said “extended” instead of “unlimited.” Quietly changed.
During that rate-limited period, I opted out of the new pricing model. Oddly enough, I still had over 150 requests left from the old Pro plan, which had a 500 request limit. It was strange — I was being rate limited under the new pricing, but still had leftover credits on the old one.
Claude really is something special — it fixes problems, instead of making them worse, unlike some other models. After finishing the remaining old plan requests, I considered switching to usage-based pricing. At $0.04 per request (with each one supporting up to 25 tool calls), it seemed fair.
But in practice, under the new pricing, even a simple task using an agent would quickly rack up $0.20 or more — before the agent even edits a file. Compared to the old pricing, it just felt like a rip-off. So I stuck with the old plan for a while longer.
Then, another change: the option to opt out of the new pricing quietly disappeared from the dashboard. Existing users could still contact support to be moved back. (Pricing Megathread and Q&A - #64 by danperks) So I did — I reached out to support asking to be switched back. No reply.
Meanwhile, my plan suddenly reset to free overnight. I still don’t know if Cursor staff downgraded me or if it was automatic. I had requested a refund on July 8. Logically, if I was refunded, the downgrade should’ve happened then — but it didn’t. More confusion.
But the biggest issue in all of this? Communication. There were no emails, no clear announcements about the pricing changes. Things just silently shifted in the background, and then the forums exploded with people asking what was going on.
I want to be clear: I don’t hate Cursor. I actually got a lot of value out of it. And I’m thankful for that. But communication needs serious improvement. When you’re asking users to trust your product — especially paid users — they deserve transparency.
That’s all I wanted to share. Thanks for reading. 