Hi, new to cursor. I’ve always wanted to make my own app. I tried Cursor over the weekend and went from design idea to full iOS development in just 2 days.
While this is great I noticed that I had a lot of bugs that I needed to fix to get the product looking and working right. Right now I have the Pro subscription and I have ran out of my usage.
I want to do more tweaks but it seems you can’t do much unless you have Pro+ or the more expensive plans.
My app is very simple and doesn’t use any API calls or does anything fancy, it just saves data locally.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to do this?
Here are a few ways to stretch your usage further:
Use Auto or Composer 2 for most everyday edits and bug fixes. They are designed to be much more cost-efficient for agentic coding.
Save the more expensive models or Max Mode for harder problems, architecture decisions, or bugs where cheaper models are not getting it right.
Keep prompts tightly scoped, for example: “Only fix this button layout in this file” instead of “review and improve the whole app.”
Batch small visual tweaks together so the agent can make one pass instead of several separate runs.
Include the exact error, screenshot, file, or expected behavior upfront. The fewer discovery loops the agent needs, the less usage you’ll burn.
Ask Cursor to make a plan first, then approve the smallest change. This can help avoid broad rewrites or unnecessary refactors.
For simple mechanical edits, use chat/manual edits rather than asking Agent to explore the whole codebase.
For plan choice: Pro Plus is generally recommended for people using Agent daily. If you’re not sure whether your usage falls between Pro and Pro Plus, you can enable on-demand usage first and monitor your usage dashboard. If you consistently land closer to Pro Plus usage levels, upgrading may make more sense than relying on on-demand each month.
$20 won’t get you very far these days unfortunately.
A good tip is to try and stop using screenshots as context, while its great if you’re lazy they add up a lot in terms of usage. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong!
Screenshots do eat into the context a bit, but the bigger contributor is usually long-running chats that could’ve been split up. Starting a new chat whenever you can will go a long way in reducing token use.
Well it surely became lot more expensive lately. I don’t know if the (good?) models got more expensive or what. It feels like everything is like twice to 4 times more expensive. Either something is using much more tokens now or we have 200-400% inflation
Yes, everything is getting more expensive. Always a good idea to reference the Cursor premium model pricing page and sort by cost so you can see just how much you’ll be charged asking questions of the big boy models. Use Composer 2 (eh…) or try Codex 5.3 Spark [it’s free!], but just be aware that you have to prompt more carefully and limit the scope of your request as you use less capable models.
