Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users
'We recognize that we didn't handle this pricing rollout well and we're sorry,' said Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. 'Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many of you.'
Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor's Pro plan. Instead of Pro users getting 500 fast responses on advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then unlimited responses at a slower rate, the company announced subscribers would now get $20 worth of usage per month, billed at API rates. The new plan allows users to run coding tasks in Cursor with their AI model of choice until they hit the $20 limit, and then users have to purchase additional credits to continue using it.
However, Pro users took to social media to file their complaints in the weeks following the announcement.
Many users said they ran out of requests in Cursor rather quickly under the new plan, in some cases after just a few prompts when using Anthropic's new Claude models, which are particularly popular for coding. Other users claimed they were unexpectedly charged additional costs, not fully understanding they'd be charged extra if they ran over the $20 usage limit and had not set a spend limit. In the new plan, only Cursor's 'auto mode,' which routes to AI models based on capacity, offers unlimited usage for Pro users.
Anysphere says it plans to refund users that were unexpectedly charged, and aims to be more clear about pricing changes moving forward. The company declined TechCrunch's request for comment beyond the blog post.
Truell notes in the blog that Anysphere changed Cursor's pricing because 'new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks' — meaning that some of the latest AI models have become more expensive, spending a lot of time and computational resources to complete complicated, multi-step tasks. Cursor was eating those costs under its old Pro plan, but now, it's passing them along to users.
While many AI models have lowered in price, the cutting edge of performance continues to be expensive — in some cases, more pricey than ever. Anthropic's recently launched Claude Opus 4 model is $15 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire 'Lord of The Rings' series) and $75 per million output tokens. That's even more costly than Google's launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most expensive AI model ever.
In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for 'priority' access to AI models — an additional premium on top of what AI models already cost that guarantees reliable, high speed performance.
These expenses may be filtering their way down to AI coding tools, which seem to be getting more expensive across the industry. Users of another popular AI tool, Replit, were also caught off guard in recent weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.
Cursor has become one of the most successful AI products on the market, reaching more than $500 million in ARR largely through subscriptions to its Pro plan. However, Cursor now faces intense competition from the AI providers it relies on, while simultaneously figuring out how to affordably serve their more expensive AI models.
Anthropic's recently launched AI coding tool Claude Code has been a hit with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company's ARR to $4 billion, and likely taking some users from Cursor in the process. Last week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic employees that led product development of Claude Code.
But if Cursor intends to keep its market-leading position, it can't stop working with the state-of-the-art model providers — at least, not until its own home-grown models are more reasonably competitive.
So Anysphere recently struck multi-year deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very high rate limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan also told TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time.
However, it certainly feels as if the pressure between Cursor and AI model developers is building.
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