I’m a long-time Cursor Ultra subscriber. I saw the new X Subscription pricing today and want to say a few things.
Cursor earned its place next to Codex and Claude Code not because of its own model, but because it was “one editor where you can use the best models.” A lot of us have all three installed, and Cursor is the one that stays open all day, precisely because it isn’t locked to any single vendor.
The new plans change that. The monthly fee only buys Grok usage. Claude and GPT are billed at API list price from the very first request, completely outside the plan. Ultra at $200 gets you 50x Grok usage, plus an X checkmark and Grok Bot. For anyone whose daily driver is a third-party model, almost none of that money goes toward what they actually need.
This is self-sabotage. Everything Cursor built over the past few years, its user base and its reputation, comes down to one thing: model neutrality. Now the team is tearing that out with its own hands and filling the gap with a model that hasn’t yet proven itself for coding. Users aren’t fooled; they’ll vote with their feet. Years of trust can be spent on a single pricing page, and winning it back will take far longer.
I understand that after the acquisition there’s pressure to drive Grok adoption, but the order is backwards. First make Grok genuinely competitive for coding, and users will switch on their own. What’s happening instead is that the model hasn’t won yet, and pricing is being used to force the move. People who can’t or won’t switch don’t start using Grok; they leave. And the ones leaving aren’t casual users. They’re the people paying $200 a month, with all three tools installed, who made Cursor their primary workspace.
The communication has been careless too. New Ultra and old Ultra share a name but aren’t the same product. The old docs still say “includes Other Models.” Third-party billing is a single line of fine print at the bottom of the pricing page. And on launch day the service went down, so the first thing existing users saw was an error on the billing page.
A few concrete requests:
- State clearly how third-party models are billed on the new plans. Not a footnote.
- Keep a purchasable plan that includes a third-party usage allowance, even at a higher price.
- Commit that legacy Ultra can be renewed indefinitely, instead of just saying it “continues for now.”
Cursor’s users came for the freedom to choose their model. Turn that freedom into an add-on, and what’s left is an editor with Grok inside, something anyone else can build. At that point Cursor stops being a leader and becomes just another distribution channel for Grok.