The CEO of Anysphere, the corporate behind the favored AI-powered coding surroundings Cursor, apologized Friday for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Professional plan. The adjustments resulted in some customers complaining that they unexpectedly confronted extra prices.
“We acknowledge that we didn’t deal with this pricing rollout properly and we’re sorry,” stated Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. “Our communication was not clear sufficient and got here as a shock to lots of you.”
Truell is referring to a June 16 update to Cursor’s Professional plan. As a substitute of Professional customers getting 500 quick responses on superior AI fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, after which limitless responses at a slower fee, the corporate introduced subscribers would now get $20 price of utilization per thirty days, billed at API charges. The brand new plan permits customers to run coding duties in Cursor with their AI mannequin of alternative till they hit the $20 restrict, after which customers need to buy extra credit to proceed utilizing it.
Nonetheless, Professional customers took to social media to file their complaints within the weeks following the announcement.
Many customers stated they ran out of requests in Cursor quite rapidly underneath the brand new plan, in some circumstances after just a few prompts when using Anthropic’s new Claude models, that are significantly in style for coding. Different customers claimed they had been unexpectedly charged additional costs, not absolutely understanding they’d be charged additional in the event that they ran over the $20 utilization restrict and had not set a spend restrict. Within the new plan, solely Cursor’s “auto mode,” which routes to AI fashions primarily based on capability, gives limitless utilization for Professional customers.
Anysphere says it plans to refund customers that had been unexpectedly charged, and goals to be extra clear about pricing adjustments transferring ahead. The corporate declined TechCrunch’s request for remark past the weblog submit.
Truell notes within the weblog that Anysphere modified Cursor’s pricing as a result of “new fashions can spend extra tokens per request on longer-horizon duties” — that means that a number of the newest AI fashions have develop into costlier, spending plenty of time and computational assets to finish difficult, multi-step duties. Cursor was consuming these prices underneath its previous Professional plan, however now, it’s passing them alongside to customers.
Whereas many AI fashions have lowered in worth, the slicing fringe of efficiency continues to be costly — in some circumstances, extra dear than ever. Anthropic’s just lately launched Claude Opus 4 mannequin is $15 per million enter tokens (roughly 750,000 phrases, longer than the complete “Lord of The Rings” collection) and $75 per million output tokens. That’s much more expensive than Google’s launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its most costly AI mannequin ever.
In current months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for “priority” access to AI models — an extra premium on high of what AI fashions already value that ensures dependable, excessive velocity efficiency.
These bills could also be filtering their approach right down to AI coding instruments, which appear to be getting costlier throughout the trade. Customers of one other in style AI device, Replit, had been additionally caught off guard in current weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.
Cursor has develop into one of the profitable AI merchandise available on the market, reaching greater than $500 million in ARR largely by subscriptions to its Professional plan. Nonetheless, Cursor now faces intense competitors from the AI suppliers it depends on, whereas concurrently determining tips on how to affordably serve their costlier AI fashions.
Anthropic’s just lately launched AI coding device Claude Code has been a success with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company’s ARR to $4 billion, and sure taking some customers from Cursor within the course of. Final week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic workers that led product improvement of Claude Code.
But when Cursor intends to maintain its market-leading place, it will probably’t cease working with the state-of-the-art mannequin suppliers — a minimum of, not till its personal home-grown models are extra moderately aggressive.
So Anysphere just lately struck multi-year offers with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to offer a $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan with very excessive fee limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan additionally instructed TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time.
Nonetheless, it actually feels as if the strain between Cursor and AI mannequin builders is constructing.
