Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding environment Cursor, has apologized for a poorly communicated pricing change to its $20-per-month Pro plan, leading to unexpected charges for some users.
The June 16 update replaced a fixed number of fast AI responses with a $20 monthly credit, billed at API rates. Users quickly exhausted these credits, particularly with popular models like Anthropic’s Claude, and faced additional costs if they exceeded the limit without setting a spend cap. Anysphere plans to refund unexpectedly charged users and improve future communication. CEO Michael Truell stated, “We recognize that we didn’t handle this pricing rollout well and we’re sorry.”
Truell explained the change was due to increased costs from advanced AI models, which “can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks.” While some AI model prices have decreased, cutting-edge performance remains expensive; for instance, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 costs $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. This trend is impacting AI coding tools across the industry, with similar pricing changes reported by Replit users.
Some users expressed their frustration on social media, with one user stating, “Why is no one talking about how @cursor_ai essentially rug pulled??? Making the pricing ‘unlimited’ and then changing it to limited without any warning at all, i check dashboard and they bill me $71 for just 1 day of sonnet-4 usage???”
Despite generating over $500 million in annual recurring revenue, Cursor faces rising competition from AI providers and the challenge of integrating increasingly expensive models. Anysphere recently secured multi-year deals with major AI firms for a new $200-a-month Cursor Ultra plan, indicating a strategic effort to maintain its market position.
