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 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,” 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 an alternative 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 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 must buy further credit to proceed utilizing it.
Nevertheless, 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 slightly shortly below 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 totally 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, 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” — which means that a few of the photo-sharing app AI fashions have change into dearer, spending a whole lot of time and computational assets to finish sophisticated, 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 Cursor was consuming these prices below its outdated Professional plan, however now, it’s passing them alongside to customers.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 reducing 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 pricey than Google’s launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro in April, which was its costliest AI mannequin ever.
In current months, OpenAI and Anthropic have also started charging enterprise customers for “priority” access to AI models — a further premium on prime of what AI fashions already value that ensures dependable, excessive pace efficiency.
These bills could also be filtering their approach right down to AI coding instruments, which appear to be getting dearer throughout the business. Customers of one other in style AI software, Replit, had been additionally caught off guard in current weeks by pricing changes that made completing large tasks with AI more expensive.
Cursor has change into one of the vital profitable AI merchandise available on the market, reaching greater than $500 million in ARR largely by means of subscriptions to its Professional plan. Nevertheless, Cursor now faces intense competitors from the AI suppliers it depends on, whereas concurrently determining find out how to affordably serve their dearer AI fashions.
Anthropic’s not too long ago launched AI coding software 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 growth of Claude Code.
But when Cursor intends to maintain its market-leading place, it might’t cease working with the state-of-the-art mannequin suppliers — at the very least, not till its personal home-grown models are extra fairly aggressive.
So Anysphere not too long ago 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 informed TechCrunch in June he plans to work with Cursor for a long time.
Nevertheless, it definitely feels as if the strain between Cursor and AI mannequin builders is constructing.