Hi! Is this true or an AI hallucination (the response is too quick, so I guess it’s an AI response and a human confirmation is still needed)?
My email:
I’m currently still on the Pro subscription with old request-based pricing model with 500 requests per month. If I subscribe 1 year before Sept 15 2025, what will happen to my account?
1. Will I still be able to keep my request based pricing model with 500 requests/month until next year (MAX model will require usage-based pricing enabled)?
Or
2. I will be auto converted to unlimited Auto usage based pricing model until next year? So that I will have unlimited free Auto usage for 1 year + minimum $20 guaranteed usage each month until next year?
Cursor response:
The changes starting September 15th, 2025 will take effect at your next billing renewal after that date. For example, if you subscribe to a yearly plan now, these changes would only apply when your subscription renews in September 2026.
To answer your specific questions:
1. Yes, you will keep your current request-based pricing model with 500 requests/month until your next renewal after September 15th, 2025. MAX mode will continue to require usage-based pricing enabled.
2. At your next renewal after September 15th, your account will transition to the new pricing model where:
Pro includes at least $20 of model inference at API prices per month
Auto will consume your included monthly usage at specific API rates
@condor@danperks If someone is already on an annual plan that still goes beyond September 15, can we somehow already now renew for an additional year to secure at least auto staying free for an extended period (beyond the current year and pricing that applies)? Would be a nice offer for the ones that trusted you with an annual plan from the beginning instead of trying for a few months.
hi @MichaelBui my apologies that I missed your question. The email answer is not entirely correct.
When you change your subscription to a new Pro Annual subscription before 15th September following happens:
You switch to token based billing as there are no new subscriptions with request based billing.
Annual subscriptions started before 15th September will keep the free Auto model until the next renewal. At next renewal in 2026 it switches to regular billing of Auto based on token usage.
I’m in the same boat as you. So far I’ve been unable to prolong the subscription (the UI says it will be prolonged on Sep 23 and the button to renew the subscription is inactive). I’ve also tried to cancel the subscription, but in that case it will still remain active until Sep 23. I guess Cursor guys have to cancel the subscription in advance.
@condor
I’m a little confused here, changing pricing implies that you need to pump that cash flow, or that whatever VC is behind you wants to boost that revenue, but you’re telling us that we have until the 15th to sign up for an annual plan, and that we can still take advantage of the auto planfor one year, There’s a bit of a contradiction here between the kindness of the team and the wishes of the VC behind your back
Either that implies that your business model doesn’t need this cash flow and that you were already profitable, so you can push the “free” auto for a year, or it implies that there is quite a lot of pressure from VC, so would you mind providing a little more clarity to the community?
Hi @Marusha_eh, I understand there’s some confusion around the changes. I just want to clarify that my answers are based on the information available, and I’m not involved in broader business decisions. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like me to address or pass on. Thanks for sharing your concerns!
Yes, I would really like the team to take more time to communicate about the auto model. I think most of the confusion in the community stems from switching to a paid token system for the auto model, which is good as an entry-level assistant but doesn’t even compare to 20% of the performance of newer models. There has been a real gap between communication and action over the last few months, and the fact that the team is giving us until tomorrow to get Auto for a year clearly indicates that the cost of this Auto model is not that high for the team. I understand that revenue needs to be increased, as all businesses grow with their revenue, but the problem here remains the lack of transparency regarding the costs/revenue/quality of the model and future plans. There is certainly abuse of the APIs that justifies ending the free auto model, but I doubt that anyone using the UI exceeds the $20 per month cost for a model that, as mentioned above, performs at a maximum of 20% of the competition.
@Marusha_eh Auto mode performance is steadily improving as we add stronger models, including GPT-5 and Sonnet 4. So actual performance is much higher than 20%.
If you ever see Auto not working as expected, please do report it as a Bug Report and include a Request ID, that really helps us track and fix issues faster!
While we’re always working to improve every feature in Cursor, we can’t publicly share each update in detail just yet. But I want to reassure you that we closely monitor model performance and usage to keep things moving in the right direction.
For reference, the change was announced about a month ago with details about pricing and its impact for users.
As of today, the Auto mode is moving to a paid model. Team plans are also becoming less favorable. Let’s evaluate whether the previous “promotion” for Auto mode with an annual subscription was a joke or actually a good investment.
So far, I’ve only tested Claude Sonnet 3.5 and GPT-4o — not very impressive.
I think Cursor is optimizing costs by trimming excess. There’s no point in millions of users if the remaining 100k generate equivalent revenue.
I tried qwen code and was impressed by the response quality in agent mode. This isn’t an ad — it’s still free for now. I expect a user migration soon. Qwen3-code-plus clearly outperforms Claude Sonnet 3.5, which Cursor offers in Auto mode, and is catching up to Sonnet 4, while providing a 1M token context window.
I’m not sure how I feel now about Auto with this change because if I’m redirected to a model that is actually cheaper than I’m paying for in Auto that’s a bit shady don’t you think?
I think you should really add other models like GLM 4.5 which is really good and extremely cheap. Bear in mind that GitHub Copilot has free requests of certain models and you can use any API, like GLM and others at very low rates.
I’m switching every day from Cursor to Visual Code, and to be honest, I like Cursor due to some UI differences and the diffs, but I’m not sure if those perks make Cursor worth it at this point.
I got an annual subscription as this gives me another 12 months of free auto agent use. However I had a nasty bug and had to switch to claude-4-sonnet, probably as a result of the sub par performance of claude-3.5 used in auto. I chewed through the quota fairly quickly and at 80% (reset mid Oct) I decided to switch to gemini-2.5 for which I have an API key to give it a try. It kept increasing the usage but at 88% my bug was fixed. So this tells me that I can’t use my own API key to fund the agent - something I wasn’t aware of. Which raises the (maybe naive) question why do we enable our own models if they can’t be used for agentic use or maybe more relevant what can I use my own model for in the context of Cursor?
More interestingly, though I came back the next day and when opening cursor my usage dropped back to 46%! Not that I complain but why is this happening? What happened other than Cursor being kind to me which will hardly be the case
While these are important questions I always try to remind myself that (almost) regardless of the cost for agentic development we’re paying a fraction of what commercial development would chew up and opens up business opportunities out of reach before this
