The CEO of Anysphere, the corporate behind the favored AI-powered coding atmosphere 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 recognize that we didn’t handle this pricing rollout well and we’re sorry,” mentioned Anysphere CEO Michael Truell in a blog post. “Our communication was not clear enough and came as a surprise to many 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 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 need to buy extra credit to proceed utilizing it.
Nevertheless, 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 somewhat rapidly below the brand new plan, in some circumstances after just a few prompts when using Anthropic’s new Claude models, that are notably in style for coding. Different customers claimed they have been unexpectedly charged additional costs, not totally 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, affords limitless utilization for Professional customers.
Anysphere says it plans to refund customers that have been unexpectedly charged, and goals to be extra clear about pricing adjustments shifting ahead. The corporate declined TechCrunch’s request for remark past the weblog put up.
Truell notes within the weblog that Anysphere modified Cursor’s pricing as a result of “new models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks” — that means that a number of the newest AI fashions have change into costlier, spending loads of time and computational sources to finish difficult, multi-step duties. Cursor was consuming these prices below its outdated Professional plan, however now, it’s passing them alongside to customers.
Whereas many AI fashions have lowered in value, the slicing fringe of efficiency continues to be costly — in some circumstances, extra expensive than ever. Anthropic’s not too long ago launched Claude Opus 4 mannequin is $15 per million enter tokens (roughly 750,000 phrases, longer than your entire “Lord of The Rings” sequence) and $75 per million output tokens. That’s much more expensive 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 business. Customers of one other in style AI instrument, Replit, have been additionally caught off guard in latest weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.
Cursor has change into some of the profitable AI merchandise available on the market, reaching greater than $500 million in ARR largely by subscriptions to its Professional plan. Nevertheless, Cursor now faces intense competitors from the AI suppliers it depends on, whereas concurrently determining methods to affordably serve their costlier AI fashions.
Anthropic’s not too long ago launched AI coding instrument 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 staff that led product improvement of Claude Code.
But when Cursor intends to maintain its market-leading place, it could actually’t cease working with the state-of-the-art mannequin suppliers — at the least, not till its personal home-grown models are extra moderately aggressive.
So Anysphere not too long ago struck multi-year offers with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to supply a $200-a-month Cursor Extremely plan with very excessive fee limits. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan additionally advised TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a very long time.
Nevertheless, it definitely feels as if the strain between Cursor and AI mannequin builders is constructing.
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