How many prompts are you guys getting on Cursor now with the new pricing for Claude or GPT-5?
Honestly, it feels like way fewer than before — even less than the 150 we got on the free trial and nowhere near the 500 we used to get on Pro. Super disappointing to see how expensive they’ve made it. I’m a heavy coder and end up burning through two Cursor Pro accounts every week.
Compared to tools like Windsurf or Trae (which give 600 prompts for just $10/month), Cursor feels overpriced — even if the quality’s better, they’re all using the same models. We really need solid competitors offering the same quality, because the moment that happens, I’m ditching Cursor for sure. They’re getting way too greedy.
Nope, its $16/mo and I get way more than $16/mo of value.
This is illogical. You admit Cursor is higher quality, but don’t like that it cost more than the lower quality competitors. Yet you are continuing to pay the higher price because Cursor is that much better. That is how commerce works.
Don’t use Claude; it uses too many tokens. GPT 5 is ideal for both price and performance. It depends on your usage frequency and style. Instead of choosing premium models for everything, choose Auto for simple situations.
VS Code + plugins may get better over time, but I don’t think any coding IDE can compare to Cursor at the moment.
they didn’t make the same “composer” cost much more, they replaced it with stronger, better and more expensive agents
you complain that cars are too expensive because horses were cheaper (idk if it is so, haven’t checked prices on horses for a while )
you are free to use whatever tool you find more optimal for your usage.
and they’re not “getting too greedy”, they just ran out of money for subsidizing negative margins. current pricing in Cursor is fair, it was unfair for them and is unfair for Windsurf and Trae but they can afford losing money to gather more users
also, use gpt-5-mini or other cheap models if you want more “prompts” (which are very bad metric of usage for agentic stuff btw). it’s not like these cheaper models are so bad, they are a lot better than the ones we had with 500 premium requests / month
Don’t be too naive now, read the forums a bit more. Cursor has become a king in burning tokens unnecessarily, but hey, we should learn proper “token management”.
I have read the forum’s whines for long enough but I’m talking from my own experience. I’m no vibe-coder and I use agents very carefully for very specific tasks, and I myself never ever reached any limits like ever.
my bar often stays at like 18/20 at the end of a period, are you telling me I’m using it wrong?
all I wanna say is Cursor is a tool with its own use-cases. you either learn to use it for these use-cases or ditch it for something more appropriate for your specific needs.
Cursor doesn’t need to change because you or someone else doesn’t like it this way.
You’re projecting your own situation on the rest of us, but some of us actually work on large projects. Good for you that you don’t hit your limits, sounds like Cursor is perfect for small hobby projects.
I’m a senior dev working on several react & nest projects that are not cosmically-level but still quite large, I just don’t use agents to do all the hard work for me
my use-case for them is mostly brainstorming, codebase analysis and tedious refactors (that are still often easier done manually with the help of Tab honestly)
maybe I haven’t gotten good enough with properly managing agents so that’s why they don’t perform decent enough for me that it becomes better than manual work, but for most of complaints I’ve seen on this forum (and on Reddit ofc) I don’t think these are serious devs working on large projects, mostly entry-level folk who wants to leverage 99% of their work to AI or vibe-coders with less to no experience in SWE
my take is that Cursor is great for AI-assisted development, i.e. light agentic usage for tedious or analytic tasks and a lot of manual labor with autocomplete. And I hope that it stays this way as there are virtually no other tools in that niche that are good enough
and for small hobby projects / quick vibe-coded one time tools and scripts I actually use codex or just web interfaces like ChatGPT, Gemini, t3chat, etc. as they tend to give me better results with less overhaul while not costing much due to provider subsidizing it
they might be high-level devs who can and want to use agents for most of their work while performing the same in quality and speed, I just don’t believe they are a majority, more like a very small minority. Agentic coding is not quite here to rely on it with anything serious imo
Is it really that difficult to not use Sonnet 4.5 for every prompt.
This thread is about the $20 plan. Which is a perfect price for small, hobby projects, but the plan is not exclusive for those kinds of projects. Depending on your workflow, the $20 can be used professionally if you still do a handful of manual programming because you are fast or what you are making requires that level of intimacy, or you have a lot of design and other roles to balance, or you mostly use the cheaper model and tab features.
Assuming that Cursor’s $20 plan is only for “small hobby projects” may be you projecting your dependency on AI programming tools because your project is “big and serious”, while those like @nfrid and I are productive with these lighter plans.
Everything AI codes, I could have done myself and can scan through code quickly and understand exactly what it is doing and often make changes and improvements because I actually care about what I am building. If people can’t do that with the code AI is generating, then they are closer to a vibe coder/entry-level and don’t have a good way to measure the value of this tool, which is why their core complaint is that Cursor costs any money at all. $16/mo for probably $50+ of value objectively is a stupid easy decision, and Cursor is the best tool out there imo for actual programmers. Other tools are a bit cheaper (probably a temporary thing) but then are no where near as useful for someone who doesn’t just vibe code. I would not hesitate to pay 2x what I pay now for the value I am currently getting.
It’s hard to take people serious when they claim they are a professional while at the same time complaining about $16/mo.
No ones complaining about the subscriptipn price itself, i always used to make hundreds of dollars of extra costs on top of the $20. The thing is, those hundreds of dollars relatively became thousands of dollars. 92% is cache read. Cursor is way too expensive for what you get. I’ve been working with an alternative for a while now and it’s even better than Cursor, and muuuuch cheaper. Don’t be naive, the CEO of Cursor still has a text saying you can reply to his automated emails, but he never replies. Because they don’t care about us, they care about money. There you have it. Have fun.
Which alternative, I am always open to genuinely better products. Also being able to reply to the ceo was some weird marketing thing, and yea he never replied. I didn’t even know he was the ceo. I got an email and it said to reply with any questions, and I did and got no response. Cursor is probably going to become a terrible company where its too bloated and big, and when that happens I will jump ship to whatever is better. Just haven’t found it.
On the $20 a month plan, mostly use Auto these days but have found real benefit in the cheetah model and have been using that a lot. Have never hit my quote, would say I am a moderate user. If I hit a limit I would have zero issue just bumping up my plan, I already get a ton of value at the $20 level.
I’m checking on things from time to time. Because Cursor had great potential. But i see people are still making threads about the prices. Only few hobbyists not hitting limits are praising it. It’s okay though. Cursor’s good for 200k lines of code in the time i used it so you could view it the same as checking up on that ex girlfriend who used to be beautiful and all you can do is look at her and think “It was good as long as it lasted”.
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