Anysphere · Cursor
Cursor: a meter in dollars, and a tank with no size
An AI code editor with an agent, a terminal client and cloud agents on top — billed per token at list prices, on plans whose included amount the vendor no longer puts in writing.
Cursor is a proprietary AI code editor from Anysphere, now part of SpaceX, with a CLI, cloud agents and a pull-request reviewer attached. There is a free tier, three individual plans, two team seats and an enterprise contract. Usage is metered in dollars at each model's list price, and until late August the docs said how many dollars each plan included. They no longer do.
What Cursor actually is
A fork of VS Code with an AI layer built into it: an agent that plans and edits across files and runs commands, a Tab autocomplete that is the part many people switched for, and a chat panel. Around the editor sit a command-line client, cloud agents you can start from the web or an iPhone, a pull-request reviewer called Bugbot, SDKs for TypeScript and Python, and connectors into Slack, Linear, Jira, GitHub and JetBrains IDEs over the Agent Client Protocol. The queue filed it as a coding agent, and — for the second wave running — that label needs no correction.
The company behind it is Anysphere, Inc., and since 14 August 2026 Anysphere belongs to SpaceX, which completed an acquisition that began as a model-training partnership in April. That is why three of the four models in Cursor's own pool are Grok models, described as jointly trained with SpaceXAI. The client is closed: the public GitHub repository is an issue tracker with no licence, and the terms forbid derivative works. So this is not a free program with a paid service beside it, as with most tools in this section — it is a product, sold in tiers, with a free tier at the bottom.
What makes it worth a close read is the metering. Every request is billed in dollars at the list price of the model that served it, and the vendor's own pricing policy ties those rates to each model maker's list. That turns Cursor's rate card into a claim anyone can check, and we checked it: of the thirty-three third-party rows our snapshot also carries, thirty match to the cent and three do not. What the vendor stopped publishing is the other half — how many of those dollars a plan includes. The documentation printed that as a column until late August; the column is gone.
We have not run it. Even the free tier needs a Cursor account, and this desk does not create accounts or enter passwords. Everything on these three pages is the vendor's documentation, terms, pricing policy and rate card, read on the date at the top, plus archived copies of the same pages and the arithmetic our own price snapshot allows. Where our own published comparisons had drifted from what the vendor says today, we corrected them the same day.
Seven routes: three individual plans, two team seats, an enterprise contract and your own key, with a free tier beneath them. The prices are clear. The allowance each one buys is stated only as a multiple of another allowance nobody has sized since the start of September.
| Route | Bought as | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | Subscription | $20/mo $16/mo billed annually |
| Pro+ | Subscription | $60/mo $48/mo billed annually |
| Ultra | Subscription | $200/mo $160/mo billed annually |
| Teams Standard | Per seat | $40/seat/mo $32/mo billed annually |
| Teams Premium | Per seat | $120/seat/mo $96/mo billed annually |
| Enterprise | Per seat | Custom |
| Your own API key | API key | At model rates |
When the honest answer is use something else
Seven published pairs include Cursor, more than any other tool we cover. These are the six with the most searches; the seventh, against Cline, is linked from the alternatives page. Each one lives in /compare/ and is written there rather than twice.
| Pair | What it decides | Verified |
|---|---|---|
| Cursor vs Claude Code | Editor against terminal. On the neutral index Claude Code scores higher and costs several times more per task; the pair decides which of those two numbers your work is sensitive to. | 2026-08-13 |
| Windsurf vs Cursor | Two VS Code forks on the same frontier models. Windsurf, now Devin Desktop, wins on autocomplete terms and deployment reach; Cursor on the agent stack and a middle tier. | 2026-07-27 |
| Cursor vs VS Code | The same editor underneath. What the subscription buys is the AI layer, and the pair asks whether it beats a free editor plus your own key. | 2026-08-13 |
| Cursor vs GitHub Copilot | Half the entry price and every IDE, against the deeper editor loop. The pair lays the two allowance systems side by side, row by row. | 2026-07-27 |
| Codex vs Cursor | The stronger agent against the cheaper one, by wide margins in both directions — and, with the model held constant, how much of the gap is the harness. | 2026-08-13 |
| Antigravity vs Cursor | Free and metered against paid and priced. Google's harness scores higher on the index; the pair is about what the free tier stops you doing. | 2026-08-31 |
Four reasons people look past Cursor, and a different shortlist behind each one: the unsized allowance, the data path, wanting a terminal or your own IDE, and the price of a team seat. Organised by why you are going rather than by rank.
Frequently asked.
What people search next.
Q · 01 Is Cursor free? +
There is a free tier, called Hobby: no credit card, the agent and Tab with limited usage, and access to Cursor's own Composer model. None of those limits is published as a number. It needs a Cursor account. There is no paid trial documented for the editor itself; the only trial in the documentation is a usage credit for the bundled Grok Bot. The student discount was closed to new sign-ups on 25 June 2026.
Q · 02 How much usage does a Cursor plan include? +
The vendor does not say, any more. Usage is billed in dollars at each model's list price and split into two monthly pools — Cursor's own models, and everyone else's — but neither pool has a published size. The upper individual plans are sold as three and twenty times Pro, and the Premium team seat as five times Standard. Until late August the documentation printed the third-party allowance of each plan; archived copies show that for Pro it equalled the price, and for Ultra it was double it. That column was removed between 24 August and 3 September 2026.
Q · 03 Does Cursor train on my code? +
Only if you have agreed, according to the terms — and the data-use overview says that turning Privacy Mode off is how that happens. Privacy Mode is documented as on by default for teams and enterprise. For personal accounts the default is not stated anywhere we could find, so the setting is worth checking before the first prompt. Two exceptions hold even with it on: requests with your own API key follow your provider's policy, and a few models — Anthropic's Fable line among them — keep inputs at their maker for safety review.
Q · 04 Who owns Cursor? +
SpaceX. Anysphere, Inc., the company that makes Cursor and bills for it, announced on 14 August 2026 that SpaceX had completed its acquisition, a process that began with a model-training partnership in April. The Grok 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 models in Cursor's own pool are described as jointly trained by Cursor and SpaceXAI, and Grok Bot, SpaceXAI's work agent, is bundled into Cursor's paid plans and signs in with a Cursor account.
Q · 05 Is there a cheaper Cursor plan in India? +
Yes, and only there. Cursor Start is priced in rupees, tax included, payable with UPI, and requires an Indian phone number. It covers Cursor's own models at a fixed medium effort with no fast mode, plus cloud agents, but not third-party models, on-demand usage, Bugbot or automations. We do not list it among the routes because it is not sold in dollars and converting a tax-inclusive local price would print a figure the vendor never published.
Q · 06 Can I use Cursor with my own API key? +
Yes, for chat models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock; Tab completion keeps using Cursor's models. On individual plans your provider bills the tokens and nothing is drawn from your allowance. On team plans each third-party request, including one on your own key, carries a per-token platform fee that does draw from it. Either way the request passes through Cursor's servers, and the vendor's zero-retention agreements do not cover it.