Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.

Our experience has been the direct opposite. The way to get the most out of cursor was to leave it on auto - we saw it average around 3.9 cents per request under the old contract (per-seat pricing) and more like 39 cents per request under the new (single pooled cost for everyone). Composer came in a little higher, more like 50c/r, while the claude models were up into the dollars. Meanwhile, if you use Claude-the-app, there is _no_ cheap model and the default switched to Opus in April, resulting in increased costs across the board.

We have both Claude and Cursor here, as well as agents running GPT, things in AWS Bedrock, etc and its my team handle the bills...when people use Cursor on auto, costs are under control, but there's always a dozen or so whale users who'll switch models manually and blow through the budget like it's not there.

Another thing: "better cost controls". There was for example no way for us to disable Fable in Claude, but we could in Cursor. Again, the opposite experience.

Well, auto can produce garbage code. I'd rather be able to select the model manually myself and so far it's much more economical to give people Claude Code and Codex subscriptions as those are subsidized per seat plans.

For the kind of ML work I do Cursor's "Auto" was too unreliable. It would frequently try to solve relatively difficult tasks using Composer, when it should have been routing to a true frontier model. Annoyingly, doesn't tell you what model it's decided your task deserves, so I often wasted time working through a problem with it, only to realise I was on a dumb model. Then I revert all the work, switch to an expensive frontier model and pay expensive API prices to actually solve the task.

All that is to say, model selection is the main control we have over quality. Giving it up in the name of cost saving will bite you in the long run, especially when Claude Code still has such good plan pricing.

I also had a problem with Cursor auto switching on fast mode which I would never use otherwise.

Cursor really needs a stronger model than Composer 2 which is the root of the problem. Hopefully they will put out something better now that they have better datacenter access with SpaceX.

Yes that was very annoying considering the 5x cost increase for fast. I can wait it's fast enough.

The price you're objecting to is the heavily subsidized cost, it'll be 4x that in 12 months

More precisely -> the competitors heavily subsidize which causes cursor to feel expensive.

> Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)

https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040/

> I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month.

I switched to Codex because Cursor was costing me $10k / month. If the price goes up by 4x I'm not sure the value will be there for a lot of people.

Same I’d pay for Cursor again if they get more price competitive with Claude max

Reply on news.ycombinator.com