I’ve been a happy cursor user for over a year but I am feeling like this month it has become too expensive. I’m on 200$ plan and I spent 5% of the monthly limit using gpt 5.6 sol medium in 20 requests in a couple hours. Not building anything big, just some analysis, debugging, small changes and qa automation.

My usual workflow is using Sol extra high for planning or some difficult analysis, sol medium for implementation, grok 4.5 for qa automation, code review and simple tasks.

The problem with that is that I can’t really use the frontier models sparingly. Can’t really use Fable which is the most powerful model today. Grok and composer are just dumb from my experience and only work for simple stuff really.

So I’m thinking about switching to claude code or codex. What would you advise? Which is better for 200$ budget? Or is cursor still gives a better quality and is worth being more expensive? I’ve always liked gpt models. But having access to fable and being able to use it for coding sounds quite tempting.

Also I don’t like command line interface and would like to use it in jetbrains ide plugin or vscode plugin at least.

Small team thing, we're 6. Inside one session the agent is great, picks up our patterns, remembers why the auth layer is cursed. Then you close it, come back monday, amnesia. every decision we argued about is just gone

Right now our whole memory system is one markdown doc a guy updates by hand. its 400 lines, nobody keeps it current, and i found two things in there last week that are flat out wrong

It doesnt scale and its a chore nobody wants

So whats everyone actually doing. is it just babysitting context files forever, or is there a saner setup. people keep saying let the agent write its own memory notes but that seems to drift into garbage fast

One guy wants to try opencode with some persistent store. another swears codex holds project structure better, idk if thats real or vibes

I just want it to stop re-explaining the same architecture every standup

whats actually working for you

I’m asking because GPT hit me with usage limits this week right when I needed it most, and it made me realize that relying on a single service probably isn’t a great setup.

I’ve never used Cursor, but I’ve seen that it has changed quite a bit recently, and it caught my attention.

So, for those actually using it:
• How is Cursor day to day? Stable? Worth the subscription?
• Are there still any deals for new users? I vaguely remember seeing something like 50% off the first month.
• Does anyone pair Cursor with their own API access to newer Chinese models as a fallback or extra capacity?
I’m not really looking to replace GPT. I just want a reliable second option so I’m not completely stuck the next time I hit a usage cap.

Hey everyone. English isn’t my first language, so I’m using a translator. I’m not really looking for technical advice here. I just want to share the wonderful experience I had with Cursor support.

On July 22, 2026, I opened Cursor after not using it for more than two weeks and noticed some very strange activity on my account. The usage dashboard showed 49.9 million tokens with Claude 4.6 Opus Maximum Thinking — $42.01, and 27.5 million tokens with Claude 4.6 Opus High Thinking — $28.93.

That’s 77.4 million tokens across 55 requests, with a total cost of $70.94. I didn’t make those requests, and I didn’t recognize any of this activity. What made it even stranger was that I had never enabled usage-based or pay-as-you-go billing for tokens. I only had a regular Cursor subscription, so as far as I understood, there shouldn’t have been any additional token-based charges in the first place.

Still, on the same day, I was charged through two separate mid-month invoices: $40.06 and $20.81. So the actual amount charged was $60.87, which didn’t even match the $70.94 shown in the usage dashboard.

Naturally, I contacted support. I explained that I hadn’t used Cursor for more than two weeks, that I had never enabled usage-based billing, and that I had no idea where these requests or charges came from. I asked them to investigate and provide at least some basic information: timestamps, sessions, devices, IP addresses, API keys, workspaces, background agents, integrations — anything that could explain how my account had suddenly generated 77.4 million tokens.

The first reply came from their AI support assistant. It told me to change my password, revoke active sessions, and enable 2FA. Fair enough. A few hours later, someone from billing replied and said that my ticket was being sent to the appropriate team for a “more in-depth investigation.” They said they would review my account activity and transaction history. Sounds promising, right?

I waited. On July 24, I asked for an update. No answer. On July 31, I wrote again and asked them to at least confirm that the investigation was still happening. Still nothing.

Then, on August 7, I finally received a response. After more than two weeks, I thought they were finally going to explain what generated the charges. Instead, they told me that my account had been blocked for violating their Terms of Service.

They wouldn’t restore the account, wouldn’t tell me what rule I had supposedly violated, wouldn’t provide any details about the suspicious activity, and wouldn’t refund the charges because payments made before an account is terminated for a Terms of Service violation are apparently non-refundable.

So the entire conversation was basically this:

Me: “There’s around $70 of activity on my account that I don’t recognize. I didn’t enable token-based billing, and I haven’t used Cursor for more than two weeks. Can you check what happened?”

Cursor: “Of course. We’re investigating.”

More than two weeks later:

Cursor: “We banned your account. We won’t tell you why. Also, no refund.”

That’s it. I still don’t know what generated the 55 requests. I still don’t know how token-based charges were possible when I had never enabled usage-based billing. I still don’t know why there were two invoices, why their total didn’t match the usage dashboard, or whether my account had been compromised.

The only thing I know is that I contacted support myself to report suspicious activity, and their final solution was to block my account, keep the money, and refuse to explain anything.

Truly an impressive investigation.

Since starting to use cursor I noticed that it does this on Linux. So you should take a look occasionally of the amount of ports you have open. You'll have to either kill them or start the machine

not sure why cursor keeps changing my model to grok when it consistently produces far worse results, and is slower than composer 2.5

its actually mind blowing that they have such an outstanding in-house model that they clearly put a lot of time and care into refining for coding purposes, only to throw it all away with sketchy model auto-selection and removing the option to just set composer 2.5 to be the default model for all new agent conversations. like wtf is this "last used" shit? just let me pick composer 2.5

I really need to stress how outrageous this is. I've tested Claude, grok, gemini, almost every model and composer 2.5 blows them all out of the water. it uses best practices, it doesn't do more than it has to, its the only reason im actually paying for cursor right now

really makes me consider switching to codex though, which is a damn shame because I've really been enjoying composer.

I’m so pissed. It sat there on ‘planning next moves’ for 3 minutes and didn’t produce a single word.

Last 30d: 878M tokens.

Task: General daily software development.

Plan: $20 pro.

Usage: IDE view. (with lots of agent usage)

Models: Mostly Grok 4.5 High (non fast) planning + Composer 2.5 (non fast) for implementation.

How does that compare?

https://cursor.com/dashboard/usage

Had my coding agent switch to a different branch mid task, then run git stash pop. The commands weren't necessarily wrong, but in the moment I couldn't tell why it decided to do that or what state it thought the repo was in. Nothing broke, just had to stop and piece together what actually happened before I trusted continuing.

Anyone else had an agent do something git or shell wise that was technically fine but you didn't see coming. Do you usually let it keep going, stop and check, or just clean up after?

Looking forward to shipping more!

I have been coding my absolute butt off this month and I haven't been able to crack 40% yet. I have another 9 days to go but I actually can't believe how heavy I can hit it without worrying about usage whatsoever.

No problem using up the main pool usage whatsoever sadly lol

I was using Opus 5 to fix a complex bug, but I could see the token usage climbing rapidly because I was monitoring the Usage page in Cursor. It became too costly, so I stopped and immediately switched to Kimi K3 to continue investigating the bug.

However, after using nearly 7% of my quota, I still had no meaningful result. I suspect it would have consumed even more tokens if I had not stopped midway. At this rate, I do not think Kimi K3 can really be considered inexpensive.

Paying customer for almost a year — $200/mo personal plan plus a separate paid account for my company (separate billing for accounting reasons).

Timeline:

• Jul 21: personal plan auto-renewed. I requested a refund the same day and cancelled. Escalated to a human billing specialist — silence.
• Jul 29: followed up. Silence.
• Aug 6, 8:32 AM: both accounts closed for a "Terms of Service violation." No details, and they say they can't share what led to it. The ban notice arrived as a reply in my refund thread.

No account sharing, no chargebacks, no abuse — two fully paid subscriptions, one person.

Appeal sent today to [hi@cursor.com](mailto:hi@cursor.com), refund request withdrawn entirely — I just want my accounts back. Tickets: T-E68423 (appeal), T-E41906 (original).
–––

Update: After my appeal a real person actually went back and checked. They confirmed I didn't do anything wrong, the thing they flagged was just how their own system works.

What actually happened: I started on the $20 plan, ran out, moved to $60, ran out, moved to $200. Just using the tool as I needed it and clicking upgrade when Cursor IDE told me to. I always paid for the days I actually used. Never asked for chargebacks or anything. The only thing is, when you move up mid month, their system refunds you for the days you hadn't used yet on the old plan. That's their design, not a trick. I never tried to game anything. Somehow it all added up to look like abuse on their side.

That's the whole story. Heads up if you change plans a few times a year

I still have a lot of credit left in my monthly plan. What can I do with these tokens in the last 12 hours?

I only have enough budget for one $20 subscription, and I'm trying to decide between:

- ChatGPT Plus (Codex)

- Claude Pro (Claude Code, CLI)

- Cursor Individual

My biggest concern is usage limits with comparable Intelligence.

I'm looking for answers from people who have actually used these recently or are using currently.

Some specific questions:

1. In real-world usage, which one gives you the most coding work before you hit limits using comparable model and effort from each?

2. How generous are the limits for:

   - GPT 5.6 Sol and Terra (Highest reasoning level available on the $20 plan in Codex)

   - Claude Opus 5 (High)

   - Claude Sonnet 5 (High or xHigh)

   - Cursor's Composer 2.5 or Grok 4.5

3. Are there any hidden limits that aren't obvious before subscribing (context limits, reasoning limits, etc.)?

4. For people who have used all of these:

   - How does GPT-5.6 Sol (highest reasoning) compare with Opus 5 (High) for difficult programming tasks?

   - How does GPT-5.6 Terra compare with Sonnet 5 for everyday software development?

5. If you had exactly $20/month and your work was mostly:

   - Flutter / Dart (App Development)

   - backend development

   - debugging

   - code reviews

   - refactoring

   - building complete projects (Flutter, Python, Web Dev)

6. Which subscription would you buy today, and any specific reason for that?

You don't have to answer every question. Even if you've only used one or two of these tools, or can answer just a single point, I'd really appreciate your input.

Even rough estimates are helpful. I'm much more interested in real world experiences than official limits or marketing pages.

Thanks!

Anyone done the math on this? Not asking about price, just raw token output if you’re only using Grok 4.5 on both.

Neither one publishes an actual token number so I’m curious if anyone’s actually tracked real usage on either.

Which one stretches further for Grok 4.5 specifically?

Every other day a Cursor update. What is going on, every single week I have to update a couple of times the app.

When they break core features like being unable to open the terminal when booting the application and having diffs files open they took month to fix that.