I prefer Cursor over other platforms because of its unlimited slow requests feature. However, the current speed of slow requests (3-5 minutes) is extremely slow, unprofessional, and not logical. It forces users to buy fast requests, which feels unfair.
The fast request pricing is also too expensive: $20 for 500 requests is a lot, especially when competitors like [Win…] offer 1,500 requests for just $10!
I hope you can consider improving the speed of slow requests or revisiting the pricing model to make it more accessible. Cursor is a great platform, and with these improvements, it can become unbeatable!
The Cursor team are going above and beyond to make Cursor as competitively priced as possible.
Depending on how much code is being sent, $20 for 500 requests is often cheaper than direct access to Cursor’s API providers, such as Anthropic and OpenAI (it’s actually very easy to far exceed $20 for 500 requests, especially for longer or output heavy chats).
Although some competitors have lower prices, these are heavily subsidised and—without speaking to their balance sheet—are likely unsustainable “honeymoon” rates to attract new customers (my opinion).
Cursor appreciates and values their free users, and tries to share slow requests as equitably as possible. To this end, the more slow requests you use, the longer you wait. This helps ensure that people using fewer requests get higher priority in the queue, and don’t feel like they’re disadvantaged because of other users who are using many more slow requests than them.
These queue times should decrease over time as Cursor gets more access to compute.
“Not sourcing the AI” doesn’t mean you get it cheaper. If anything, it means it’s more expensive since you’ve got another company’s profit margins to consider.
Cursor has a generous free plan, and non-pro users can still get a lot of productivity out of the app. Cursor aims to be as generous as possible while creating a sustainable business model.
You can also add your own API key to Cursor. This gets you all of the productivity benefits of the IDE (e.g. inline edits, access to composer, Rules for AI / .cursorrules / Project Rules) while getting access to the prices on offer at OpenAI and Anthropic.
I assume you worked at Cursor. Does cursor plan to offer unlimited fast response as a plan? say 40 to $60 dollars a month?
I think that’s a win win situation. As a developer, I don’t need to even think. For cursor, most of the users who purchased this plan will not use that much quota.
Misaligned incentives: developers aren’t incentivised to be more vigilant with their usage because they no longer have to pay for the requests.
Adverse selection: Power users disproportionately sign up, leading to unsustainable costs and potential service degradation for everyone.
But if you want to enable a flexible pricing model where you don’t have to think as much about approaching your monthly quote, you can enable usage-based pricing.