Hey, great breakdown. The bounding method across multiple readings is really elegant. But there are a couple things that change the picture.
First and most important, Pro has two different pools, and they work differently.
- Cursor Models pool includes Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5. This is where your
cursor-grok-4.6-mediumcame from. - Other Models pool is third party models at API rates, about $20 of included usage per month. This is where your GPT-5.6 runs land.
This breaks the main thesis. You derived your 442M to 558M from grok readings, meaning from the Cursor Models pool, but you labeled them as on the $20 plan. But the $20 is the Other Models pool, which is where your GPT-5.6 runs live, not grok. The included budget for the Cursor Models pool in dollars is not published. In the docs it is described as higher included limits, without a fixed dollar number. So the $20 figure just does not apply to grok readings. Your separate estimate of $0.03 per run for GPT-5.6 against $20 is correctly attributed.
Second, even within a single pool there is no single fixed token number per month. Both pools are dollar based. Pricing is per token and split by token type input, cache write, cache read, output all cost different amounts. For Cursor Models in the docs Models & Pricing | Cursor Docs it is input $0.50 to $4, cache read $0.20 to $1, output $2.50 to $15. So a token quota floats depending on the model and cache profile. Your 442M to 558M is a token equivalent of the spent share of the Cursor Models pool for your specific grok mix, not a universal number.
This also explains two observations.
- +38% on extend makes sense if cache read is cheaper per token than fresh input. The absolute cache read increase hits the budget less than it hits the token count, but it still pulls total cost up.
- The grok vs gpt asymmetry on cache write is interesting, but I will not go into internal model behavior to avoid guessing.
On cost column reads Included for each row, that is not Pro specific. On July 31, 2026 they intentionally removed dollar values from the Usage page for all self serve plans, including Teams. The Cost column and Spend metric were removed, CSV export no longer includes cost, and it also affected historical data. So you cannot pull per request and per model dollar breakdown from the Usage page by design. Context is in this thread Usage Page $$ to Token Amount? WHAT?.
What is actually available on Pro.
- Dashboard > Spending shows only on demand costs, meaning usage above the included pools. If on demand is off and you stay inside included, it will show $0. There is no dollar remaining pool in the UI, only a percentage.
- Cost fields via the Admin API exist, but they are Teams only, so not available for a solo Pro account.
And if you want to compare with other Pro users, here is a related thread on why different Pro accounts burn percentage at different speeds Why is my Cursor Pro usage limit much lower than other Pro users?.