Usage Guardrails to Stop Burning Through the Monthly Limit in Just a Few Days

Ideas Feature Requests
1

I would really like to have daily/weekly usage limits and better visibility into what is driving consumption, with the ability to set warnings, so it’s harder to accidentally burn through the monthly allowance too quickly.

I’m currently on the Ultra plan, and something went wrong while I was trying to set up an SDLC workflow in one project. I burned through my entire Ultra allowance in just 4 days. Now I have almost the entire month left without normal Cursor usage.

With a $20 plan, this is annoying but at least you can upgrade. With Ultra, there is no higher predictable subscription tier — the only option is to switch to usage-based billing. For me, that’s not really an option. I want a fixed subscription budget, not an open-ended bill. I can’t just stop development for a month, so I have to move some projects to another vendor just to be able to work till the end of a month.

It would be great if subscriptions had configurable daily and weekly limits. Something like “you’ve used the budget allowance for today, please confirm that you agree with it.” That alone would’ve been enough for me to stop and look into it before it was too late.

Another thing that would be really useful is a simple usage/optimization report to help understand why usage suddenly became huge, or recommendations/warnings about potential problems. I’m currently using another AI agent to investigate what happened, and it already found several problems in my project:

  • I had MCPs for another project, but they were also enabled for all new projects by default. would be nice if i need to enable MCP by project manually, not everything by default on. If some MCPs are never used but still enabled would be great to see a warning or recommendation to disable them.
  • One process was analyzing daily logs. Initially the logs were small, but later they grew x100 times while the cursor command processing them stayed the same. A report showing tool/command usage over time would have made this much easier to spot — maybe with warnings in case of significant changes.
  • I’ve imported several libraries to develop AI agents, and they had examples of AGENTS.md for those agents (not for the IDE). Cursor imported all of them and they all became Cursor rules. may be a to have some report or even recommended prompt to check if all rules, skills are configured properly with some strange rules

I think daily/weekly usage limits, warnings, some kind of “what caused this spike?” report, build in recommendations/checks for project consistency could prevent a lot of these situations.

6

Hi @Stanislav_Chistyakov Sorry to hear this. We don’t have immediate plans to add additional limits like weekly guardrails (in fact, the flexibility of the Cursor plan is one of the important product diffentiators and features that people enjoy, .e.g if you want to have a crazy weekend and use most of your plan in one weekend during a hackathon- you can!)

The best ways to keep usage tracked are as follows:

Usage summary under the prompt. In Cursor Settings, search for Usage Summary (under Agents) and set it to Always. The default, Auto, only appears when you are already close to the limit. In the Agents Window, that readout sits in the status area right below the prompt. The same setting also controls the bar at the bottom of the chat pane in the classic IDE. If you see the Local / context row there instead of plan usage, turn off View > Status Bar so the usage summary can show.

Dashboard. cursor.com/dashboard/spending and cursor.com/dashboard/usage show remaining allowance in both pools (Cursor Models and Other Models), plus a per-day / per-model breakdown that can help explain a sudden jump.

As you know, Ultra has two separate monthly pools. If any Cursor Models usage is still left, Composer 2.5 and Grok 4.5 can keep you building without turning on on-demand.

Additionally, while account sharing is prohibited, there is no policy that prevents you from having two ultra accounts, so if you’d like to sign up for another, that may be a potential avenue for you.

7

Thanks for the reply.

A second Ultra account is definitely not an option for me :slight_smile: It’s not convenient to manage two accounts. Please help me to understand if I can cancel my current subscription and go back to a free account while keeping the option to subscribe again later. It looks like I would need to terminate the account and start it from scratch to achieve it.

I understand the point about flexibility, from my point of view, a warning would not remove it. In any case you manage your roadmap the way you need, so it is just a feedback. In my case, I normally spend around $20–40/month on AI coding tools for my personal activities. I moved to Ultra because of my wrong expectations that $200 is more than enough for every hobby project, based on experience from my work related activities with other vendors. So it is definitely my fault, I’ll check you recommendations. I’ve also seen that many users are asking for more detailed usage reports, so may we’ll see something like this later. I don’t have any question about the correctness of your report - just more details to understand misconfigurations and the way to fix in within the project, to have normal spending

Kind regards

Stanislav

8

Oh :frowning: i am not able to delete the account, just because i have some on demand spending and it require to wait till the Sep, 1 to complete the final billing. Totally don’t understand why it can’t complete the billing it the time when i would like to delete my account :frowning:

9

Hi @Stanislav_Chistyakov Feel free to send us a note at [email protected] and one of our billing specialists can help you out! We’ll do our best to help you there on an individualized basis.

11

I appreciate the clarity on two accounts being okay… but it does feel odd mechanically that in some scenarios you’re better off having two accounts rather than using on-demand pricing :thinking:.