Pro Plan ($20) + Claude 4 Sonnet (No Thinking): Rate Limited After ~10 Requests? AND Old Plan Price Hike? This is Crippling

Discussions
1

Hey Cursor Team & Community,

First off, Cursor is an incredibly powerful tool when it works as expected. It’s designed for deep work and efficient coding, which is exactly what I need as someone who pushes systems hard and relies on AI for complex tasks.

However, I need to raise a critical issue regarding the new Pro plan ($20/month) and the severe rate limits being applied to Claude 4 Sonnet (specifically the version without Thinking enabled). Adding to the frustration, it seems the old pricing plan has also seen a dramatic, sudden price increase for the Thinking model.

My Experience on the New Pro Plan (Today):

I’m on the new Pro plan, expecting a certain level of usability for my workflow. Today, I was using Claude 4 Sonnet (standard, non-Thinking). My usage was minimal – maybe around 5 to 10 requests within a relatively short period (less than an hour, certainly not hours of continuous hammering).

Suddenly, I hit a rate limit and received the message:
"You’ve hit the rate limit for your Pro plan. Upgrade to Ultra for near unlimited use, set a Spend Limit for overages, or switch to auto"

The Problem - A Dual Crisis:

  1. Extremely Low Limit on New Pro Plan: Being rate-limited after only 5-10 requests of Claude 4 Sonnet (non-Thinking) on a paid $20/month plan is unacceptable for any serious user. This isn’t “Pro” usage; it barely covers basic debugging or a short coding session. It completely breaks workflow and focus.
  2. Dramatic Price Hike on Old Plan (No Escape Hatch): As discussed in other threads, the price for Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking on the old/legacy plan has reportedly jumped from around $0.08 per use to $0.80+ per use (a 10x increase, potentially even higher based on some reports like mine seeing over $1.60 per request before hitting the limit). This change seems sudden and lacks clear prior communication. This means that for users who rely on the Sonnet Thinking model, switching back to the old plan to escape the new plan’s rate limits is not a viable solution – it just becomes prohibitively expensive instead.
  3. Lack of Transparency (Both Plans): The absolute lack of clear information on what triggers rate limits on the new plan and how long cooldowns last is still a major issue. Similarly, the sudden, unexplained price change on the old plan without clear justification or advance notice is unprofessional. We need to understand the system’s mechanics and pricing structure to use it effectively and predictably.
  4. Value Proposition Decimated: Between severe, opaque rate limits on the new plan and a sudden, massive price increase on the old plan for the Thinking model, the value proposition for users who rely on Claude 4 Sonnet (especially Thinking) is severely diminished across both available options. It feels like users are being pushed towards the $200 Ultra plan or unpredictable, expensive usage-based billing, neither of which fits everyone’s needs or budget.

Why This Matters for “Tryhards” and Power Users:

Users who leverage Cursor for deep, complex problem-solving – pushing the AI to its limits to build innovative solutions and tackle difficult problems – require reliable, consistent access to powerful models like Claude 4 Sonnet. Being throttled after a handful of requests on the “Pro” tier, or facing a 10x+ price increase on the legacy plan, feels like being told to stop innovating just when things get interesting and productive. It disrupts the very workflow Cursor is supposed to enable.

What We Need:

  1. Transparency: Clear, documented rate limits for each model on the New Pro plan (e.g., X requests per Y minutes/hours) and predictable cooldown durations.
  2. Review of New Pro Plan Limits: If hitting the limit after ~10 Sonnet requests is the intended behavior, then the Pro plan description needs to be much clearer about these severe restrictions, or the limits need to be re-evaluated to be actually “Pro”-level usable for sustained coding sessions.
  3. Clarity and Stability on Old Plan Pricing: A clear explanation for the sudden and massive price increase for Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking on the legacy plan, and ideally, a reconsideration of this pricing to make it reasonably affordable for continued use for those who prefer that model/plan structure.
  4. Viable Options: Users need either a usable “unlimited” tier (with generous, transparent limits) or predictable, affordable usage-based pricing that doesn’t suddenly jump 10x+. The current situation offers neither for those who rely on Claude 4 Sonnet.

I know I’m not alone in this (seeing the discussions in other threads). This isn’t just a minor bug; it’s impacting core usability and trust for many of us.

Cursor Team, can we please get some concrete information, transparency, and a commitment to address these issues across both the new Pro plan’s rate limits and the old plan’s price hike?

To other users experiencing either the severe rate limits on the new Pro plan or the sudden price increase on the old plan for Sonnet Thinking: Please share your specific experience below. The more visibility this gets, the better chance we have of getting a usable solution.

Thanks for listening.
A frustrated Cursor Pro user who just wants to build things without hitting invisible walls or facing sudden, unaffordable costs.

7 Likes
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what are you building on cursor where 200/mo for state of the art AI tech in an IDE is not worth it for you?

3

the problem is i cant pay 200/mo, everything was fine 20$/mo some weeks ago, 2 cents per request now we cant use it.

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I’m sorry but in my country cursor would be taken to court for false advertising.

They claim unlimited with limits, after 5 requests (NONE MAX) I’m limited. That is not what I’d call unlimited.

Something is severely broken and cursor are not being forthcoming or honest. Our concerns and complaints have been outright ignored yesterday.

It’s like I said when a day or two ago, this is a typical dubious tactic to force people, overtime the “unlimited” pro accounts will become exceptionally crippled forcing people to upgrade. @danperks and @deanrie are outright ignoring us now thinking the problem will magically vanish.

Edit: cursor isn’t some revolutionary tech, it’s literally an extension on another product with API calls. Their only marketing tactic was AI usage. Something that set them apart, if that’s gone then what do they have.

1 Like
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Hi @erophames, sorry we’ve not answered all of your questions yet!

I’ve taken a look at your usage, and I can see that in the last 24hrs you’ve used a substantial amount of Claude 4 Thinking requests - almost 1/5th of the usage you would see on the old plan. If continued, you would have been out of requests within 5 days, and that’s excluding the (cheaper) GPT 4.1 requests.

Therefore, I am not surprised to hear that you have been rate-limited. While we have designed the new system to include a lot of flexibility for how people want to use Cursor, using almost 1/5th of your monthly usage (by the old plan’s standards) in 1 day suggests that you either need to enable usage-based pricing or upgrade to the Ultra plan, as your usage exceeds that of the Pro plans allowances.

If you can share more about how you would use the old Pro plan, I can maybe give more advice for your specific situation.

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Hey @Obed0101, sorry to hear you’re seeing rate limits quicker than expected.

Looking at your specific usage, it appears you have likely exceeded your “burst” rate limit allowance, which is a high rate limit that refills slowly but is available for times of very high Cursor usage. I can see >100 Claude 4 Sonnet requests in the last ~2 days, which suggests your burst rate limit has been used.

While the burst limit is slow to reset, you then have a lower rate limit that refreshes in the space of a few hours. While you await your burst limit to refill, it’s this lower “sustained” limit that you will be relying on.

While the new plan should allow for more usage over a whole month than the previous one, I would expect that on either Pro plan structure, you would likely have had to use usage-based pricing to continue working for a whole month.

This still works the same today, but over the course of a month with the same usage, I’d expect you would see a slightly lower usage bill, with it only being used when you exceed the rate limits.

8

Regarding your mention of a hike in price on the old plan, I confirm this isn’t the case.

The legacy Pro plan is still $20 and can be opted into from the cursor.com dashboard.

The only recent change there is that we have ended the introductory discount on Claude 4, bringing it back in line with the prices of Claude 3.5 prior to Claude 4’s release.

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Hi @danperks,

You see that the information you’re providing me right now is what we need total transparency on, if users know what their burst rates are and lower rates are we can either slow down usage or stop all together for these limits to reset. Knowing that we are reaching these limits in theory would even reduce infrastructure load for you and your providers, so the way I see it is a win for everyone. At present, it’s just not workable; many users are frustrated with this. You can’t go from being total aware to where you stand to being completely in the dark. Anyways thanks for the response, but I’m not the only user exceptionally frustrated about this, there is another individual who got limited after one request.

It wasn’t me who mentioned anything about price hikes.

10

I believe the team are looking into the best options for more transparency and understanding of the interaction with the rate limits. To be clear, I have not confirmed your usage vs your rate limits, I’ve just looked at the same usage data you have access to on cursor.com and made an educated guess on what may have happened.

For now, all the details we have are posted here, but I would expect to see some changes and additional information there in the future:

11

I know you have not confirmed it, but you have confirmed the usage of the burst pool. At this point, nobody knows what is happening at all.

In any event thanks, we will see how things transpire.

1 Like
12

Forget about it. They calculated the shitstorm and now they wanna push users. Only thing that helps is stop using cursor; like cursor mods in the forum like to say: don‘t like it? Leave it! Or to match their recent communication style: „ “.

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Yes, of course it’s true that I used Claude 4 Sonnet a lot the first day it came out. Now I understand that they call it burst, but that’s why people ask for clarity to know that it is being rating limited since now there are 2 as you say, that’s why the second day I could only use 100 to only 15, but then it can’t be used more than 15, it’s literally not worth it. Before I could use it 100 times but I paid my 2 cents, now I have to pay more than 1 and a half dollars for 1 request, before it was 2 cents.

1 Like
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So, what’s wrong is the lack of transparency and the fact that the cost is now much higher than it was before, and to top it off, it exceeds the limit. Now I have to pay more than I could afford.

This new change doesn’t please everyone, but everyone would be happy, and almost no one would be bothered, if they had a progress bar for each rate limit so you know whether to continue or stop, and so that the usage-based rate wouldn’t be so high for the Claude 4 Sonnet.