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.