From Cursor’s perspective, the 500 fast calls are the primary offering, and the unlimited slow calls are meant as a stop-gap—a perk rather than a core feature. This approach is likely seen as generous, ensuring users aren’t completely cut off after exhausting their fast calls.
However, from a user’s perspective, that distinction isn’t obvious. The way the subscription is presented—“500 fast, unlimited slow”—implies that unlimited calls are a fundamental part of the service, not an extra or a temporary fallback. Naturally, users interpret their subscription as providing unlimited usage, with the only tradeoff being speed.
This difference in expectation leads to frustration when users discover that the slow pool is so slow that it’s practically unusable.
If the slow calls are intended as a limited fallback rather than a reliable feature, it might help to clarify this more explicitly in the subscription details to better align expectations.
Additionally, it’s not clear at all that there’s an algorithm in the backend that adjusts wait times based on usage, effectively penalizing frequent users. If someone uses the service as marketed—believing they have “unlimited slow calls”—they may end up in a system that deprioritizes them over time, which could be perceived as unfair.
Since this isn’t mentioned anywhere in the marketing materials, it creates a disconnect between what users think they’re paying for and how the system actually works.