To use Cloud Agents (background agents) we need to enable on-demand usage. Am I interpreting it right that this is purely a technical limitation and that subscription/included usage is consumed first? (I can’t find anything to the contrary online)
The reason I ask is because I would like to shift agent runs online. My codebase is already deeply integrated in cursor’s harness so I could do this immediately. My hesitation is that I can’t start a new agent session (fresh context) on an existing cursor VM. At the same time I’m using a ralph-inspired workflow that regularly resets context.
I can work around this, but before I go and spin up dozens of VMs to simulate a context reset I want to understand if this has cost implications or if it’s “just tokens, let’s go!”.
This is incorrect. Cloud Agents are not included in standard usage plans (e.g. Pro, Ultimate etc.) and are billed at API-pricing. On-demand usage must be enabled so that usage can be billed. Additionally, you’ll be asked to set a spending limit before launching your first cloud agent.
This is correct. There is no supported way to clear or reset the agent’s conversational context while remaining in the same VM.
My recommendation here is to start small, set limits, and see how you’re doing!
Interesting. In that case: What’s the lag of the usage/billing dashboard?
I’ve enabled on-demand billing to test cloud agents and debug the VM (and environment.json). The first ever run was billed at $0.21, which totally checks out because I ran Opus and had exceeded my included API usage long before that. By now I have spun up probably a dozen Cloud Agents with Composer 2 or Composer 2 Fast and, so far, my billing dashboard still shows $0.21 of on-demand usage.
My plan still has about 55% of included usage left for Composer models. I had assumed that this is why on-demand billing doesn’t tick up while I use cloud agents, but your answer sounds more like there being a delay/lag in usage reporting
