Pricing plan between Free and Pro?

Ideas Feedback
1

I subscribed to Cursor Pro ($20) for a month, but after about two weeks I mostly stopped using it because I was getting more value from other subscriptions I was trying in the $5–$20 range.

That part is understandable. Model pricing in Cursor is probably not subsidized much, so the price makes sense from that perspective.

Toward the end of my subscription, I started experimenting with custom models. I added Ollama Cloud, and later tried models from my Opencode Go subscription. What surprised me was that once my Cursor Pro plan ended, I could no longer use custom models on the Free plan. From what I understand, this was an intentional change, and I assume it may have been possible in the past.

So in my case, even if I do not intend to use Cursor-provided premium models and only want to use models from other subscriptions or local providers, I still need to pay $20/month. For me, that is too expensive just to access custom providers.

My suggestion: it would be great to have a cheaper subscription tier, maybe around $5, $7, or $10, focused on Cursor features rather than premium model usage.

For example, this tier could include access to:

  • Cursor’s indexing

  • Knowledge base / codebase context features

  • The Cursor editor experience and agent harness

  • Custom providers, including local models or models from other subscriptions

It could either include no premium model usage, or only a small amount. For example: pay $10/month and get $5 of premium model usage, while still having access to Cursor features and custom providers.

I understand this might reduce revenue from some users who currently pay $20. But it could also bring in users like me, who are not willing to pay $20/month just to use custom models, but would happily pay a smaller amount for Cursor’s editor features and model harness.

I actually like Cursor’s harness a lot. I compared the same models in my subscription versus inside Cursor, both out of the box, and Cursor generally delivered more stable results. I just wish there was a more affordable way to use that experience with my own model providers.

4

Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback. Posts like this with specifics on price range and which features matter are super helpful for the team to understand what’s missing in the current plan setup.

Related threads, if you want to read more:

On the current status, yes, custom providers and BYOK are only available on Pro right now. That’s an intentional decision, not a temporary limitation. If anything changes, it’ll be noted in the changelog.

5

I agree. I have Claude Code from work but I like using CC via VS code extension in Cursor to use tab-complete when I need to edit things manually. I also like to still have access to non Claude models sometimes.

But I don’t think $20 is worth it for my use case, so a $5-10 tier for light use would be good.