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 modifications resulted in some customers complaining that they unexpectedly confronted further prices.
“We acknowledge that we didn’t deal with this pricing rollout effectively and we’re sorry,” mentioned Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. “Our communication was not clear sufficient and got here as a shock to a lot 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 price, the corporate introduced subscribers would now get $20 value of utilization per 30 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 should buy further credit to proceed utilizing it.
Nonetheless, Professional customers took to social media to file their complaints within the weeks following the announcement.
Many customers mentioned they ran out of requests in Cursor moderately rapidly underneath the brand new plan, in some circumstances after just a few prompts when using Anthropic’s new Claude models, that are significantly fashionable for coding. Different customers claimed they had been unexpectedly charged additional costs, not absolutely understanding they’d be charged further 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 based mostly on capability, presents 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 modifications 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 grow to be costlier, spending loads of time and computational sources to finish difficult, multi-step duties. Cursor was consuming these prices underneath its outdated Professional plan, however now, it’s passing them alongside to customers.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 lately launched Claude Opus 4 mannequin is $15 per million enter tokens (roughly 750,000 phrases, longer than all the “Lord of The Rings” collection) and $75 per million output tokens. That’s much more pricey than Google’s launch of Gemini 2.5 Professional in April, which was its most costly AI mannequin ever.
In latest 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 price 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 fashionable AI device, Replit, had been additionally caught off guard in latest weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.
Cursor has grow to be probably the most profitable AI merchandise in the marketplace, reaching greater than $500 million in ARR largely by way of subscriptions to its Professional plan. Nonetheless, Cursor now faces intense competitors from the AI suppliers it depends on, whereas concurrently determining the right way to affordably serve their costlier AI fashions.
Anthropic’s lately launched AI coding device Claude Code has been successful with enterprises, reportedly boosting the company’s ARR to $4 billion, and certain taking some customers from Cursor within the course of. Final week, Cursor returned the favor by recruiting two Anthropic staff that led product growth of Claude Code.
But when Cursor intends to maintain its market-leading place, it could possibly’t cease working with the state-of-the-art mannequin suppliers — not less than, not till its personal home-grown models are extra moderately aggressive.
So Anysphere lately struck multi-year offers with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to supply a $200-a-month Cursor Extremely plan with very excessive price limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan additionally informed TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a very long time.
Nonetheless, it actually feels as if the stress between Cursor and AI mannequin builders is constructing.