Notes on coding agents and the pages they leave behind, on moving between notes apps, and on the plain mechanics of keeping what you think. Written and published from a Sumibako vault.
Cursor pricing in October 2026: Pro is legacy, and Claude now costs extra
Cursor's pricing since SpaceX: the X Subscription tiers, what happened to the $20 Pro plan, what Claude costs in Cursor now, and when Claude Code is cheaper.
Prashant Shaw
Founder, Sumibako
8 min read
I went to Cursor's pricing page this week to check what Pro costs, and came back knowing that the $30 plan includes "Ad-free scrolling on most surfaces" and a "Higher reply boost". Neither of those is a setting in my editor. They are on X, because since 12 October Cursor has been sold as part of The X Subscription, alongside Grok and a blue checkmark.
If you came here to find out what Cursor costs now, what happened to the $20 Pro plan, and whether Claude Code has become the cheaper way to use Claude, this is the whole of it. Everything below was checked on 28 October 2026 against Cursor's pricing page, its documentation and its staff's answers on the Cursor forum, with Anthropic's own pricing page for the other side.
🛰️ How a code editor ended up selling checkmarks
It took a little over six months, and Cursor said so at every step.
When
What happened
April 2026
Cursor announced a partnership with SpaceXAI to train models
The X Subscription launches: Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium in one plan
20 October
Staff confirm the $20 Pro plan is closed to new subscribers
26 October
Cmd+K is retired
The August post put it plainly: "Cursor has officially been acquired by SpaceX. This completes the acquisition process that started in April, when we announced our partnership with SpaceXAI to accelerate our model training efforts." The promise was compute: "We will have access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world, giving us the compute to build stronger models that are also more economical to run."
The October announcement on the forum, which has been read more than 15,000 times and answered nearly 300, introduced the bundle "which brings together Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, and X Premium in one plan." Eight days later somebody on the free plan pressed Upgrade, expected Pro, and landed on an X checkout. A staff member explained: "Standalone Cursor Pro at $20/month is a legacy plan now, so it's no longer available to new subscribers".
🧾 The new plans, read by somebody who only wanted an editor
There are five personal tiers and a team plan. This is what each one means for writing code, which is the part the pricing page lists second.
Plan
Price
Included usage
Claude and GPT
For coding
Free
$0
Limited
No
Agent, with limited requests
Plus
$8/mo
Basic
No, Grok models only
Agent, unlimited Tab
Premium
$30/mo
4x Plus
At API list price
Adds cloud agents, automations, Bugbot, Origin
Super
$100/mo
15x Plus
At API list price
Adds priority access at peak times
Ultra
$200/mo
50x Plus
At API list price
Adds earliest access to new models
Teams
from $30/user/mo
Pooled
At API list price
Adds SSO and admin controls
Three things in the small print matter more than the prices.
1️⃣ The pool is shared and weekly. The FAQ says "Every tier includes a pool of AI usage shared across Cursor and Grok", and that "Your allowance refreshes weekly, so one heavy day never wipes out your whole month." A heavy afternoon of Grok Imagine and a heavy afternoon of refactoring now come out of the same bucket. Not everyone is charmed: one forum request points out that "we pay monthly, but our usable capacity is divided into weekly windows."
2️⃣ Plus cannot use Claude at all, not even with your own key. A user who paid Anthropic five dollars for an API key and could not see a single Claude model in Cursor was told that "Plus doesn't include third-party models like Claude, and it doesn't support using your own API keys". Staff also listed what else Plus leaves out: "Auto, Cloud Agents, Automations, Bugbot, Origin, and third-party models like Claude or GPT. Those start at Premium." Tab completions are in, and unlimited.
3️⃣ From Premium up, Claude is pay as you go. "Premium and above include generous usage of Grok models but do not include an allowance for third-party models. Third-party models remain available in Cursor at API list price."
The page knows who Plus is for. Its own recommendation: "Plus is recommended for social creators with limited AI usage." And if you scroll to the comparison table, the section headed Cursor has six rows and the section headed X has nineteen, including bookmark folders, background video playback and something called Radar Search. I counted twice, the way you check a restaurant bill.
📝NOTE
Subscriptions are now sold by "X Subscription Corp", the FAQ says, and billing for anyone who switches moves from cursor.com to grok.com/dashboard/billing.
🔁 Already paying for Cursor? Read this before you press Unify
Nothing happens to an existing plan unless you change it. The legacy plans page says it twice, and the second time with a warning: "Switching to The X Subscription is optional and permanent." The overview is blunter: "The switch is permanent. It can't be undone, and Support can't undo it for you."
Here is what Cursor itself maps each old plan to:
Legacy plan
Price
Comparable new plan
Hobby
Free
Free
Pro
$20/mo
Premium, $30/mo
Pro+
$60/mo
Super, $100/mo
Ultra
$200/mo
Ultra, $200/mo
Teams Standard
$40/user/mo
Teams Premium seat, $30/user/mo
Teams Premium
$120/user/mo
Teams Super seat, $100/user/mo
What you gain by switching is Grok usage, and plenty of it: "Each paid plan on The X Subscription includes at least twice as much coding usage with Cursor models as the legacy plan it replaces, and it adds Grok and X benefits." What you lose is in the next sentence: "It also drops the included third-party model allowance; third-party models are billed separately."
So the decision is about which models you actually use. The legacy plans have two pools, one for Cursor's own models and one called Other Models for Claude, GPT and the rest. If your Other Models bar is the one that runs out every month, switching turns that bar into a prepaid balance you top up at list price, and you should stay where you are. If you live on Grok and Composer, switching is probably more usage for the money, and for teams the per-seat price goes down. The forum has people on both sides of that line, and one long-time Ultra subscriber put the first side well: "The monthly fee only buys Grok usage. Claude and GPT are billed at API list price from the very first request, completely outside the plan."
⚠️WARNING
A Cursor plan bought through the Apple App Store is not cancelled for you when you switch. "Cancel it in your iPhone or iPad Settings, or Apple keeps billing you".
💸 What Claude costs inside Cursor now
On The X Subscription, Claude is billed per token from your prepaid credit, "billed at API list prices from the first use". Cursor's model pages give the rates, per million tokens:
Model in Cursor
Input
Cached read
Output
Claude Sonnet 5.5
$2
$0.10
$10
Claude Opus 5.5
$4
$0.20
$20
Claude Opus 5.5, Fast mode
$8
$0.40
$40
Those are the same rates Anthropic lists on its own API pricing, which is to say Cursor charges what Anthropic charges and adds no discount for being your editor. Whether that is a lot depends entirely on how you work, since agents read far more than they write. One heavy user reported "I spent around $90 in just three days while using the new plan, particularly when working with advanced models." Your three days will differ, but the meter is the thing to watch, and you can set a monthly cap on it.
⚖️ Claude Code or Cursor, as of this week
Anthropic's side is simpler to describe. Claude Pro is $20 a month ($17 a month billed yearly), and "Claude Code is included in all paid plans. It shares the same usage limits as the rest of your plan, so your work in the terminal and your chats draw from one pool." Those limits "reset on a rolling five-hour session window, and paid plans add weekly limits on top." Max starts at $100 for five or twenty times Pro's usage. I wrote up how Claude's limits behave in practice, since they are the catch on that side.
The difference is where Claude sits. At Anthropic it is inside the subscription, rationed by limits. At Cursor it is outside the subscription, rationed by your card. And there is a third arrangement that Anthropic's documentation lists without fuss: the Claude Code extension has an "Install for Cursor" link on its setup page, because Cursor is a fork of VS Code.
If you...
The cheapest sensible setup
Mostly use Claude models
Claude Pro or Max, with Claude Code in a terminal or in your editor
Mostly use Grok or Composer
Cursor Plus at $8, or Premium if you want cloud agents
Want Cursor's Tab and Claude as your agent
Cursor Plus ($8) plus Claude Pro ($20), $28 a month together
Are on legacy Pro and use Claude in Cursor daily
Stay on legacy Pro and do not press Unify
Live on Opus all day
Price Claude Max against your Cursor top-ups for one real week
The $28 arrangement is less than Premium alone and gets you Claude inside a subscription instead of from a prepaid balance. It comes with two usage meters, two bills, and a checkmark on X you did not ask for. I have made worse trades.
⌨️ And Cmd+K is gone
Unrelated to the bundle, but in the same fortnight: on 26 October, Cursor removed the shortcut that turned a sentence into a shell command. A user who hit it in the terminal got a message telling them to select code, and a staff member confirmed that "Cmd+K, including generating commands in the terminal, was retired today". The replacement is the Agent, on Cmd+I. The user took it like a person whose toolbox has been rearranged: "I wasn't prepared for someone to come into my house and take my favorite hammer away from me today."
🗂️ Wherever you end up
Whichever editor and whichever agent you choose this week, the plan the agent writes before it touches your code is worth keeping somewhere you can find it next month. I make Sumibako, a notes app that Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can each file a page into with one command, and Claude.ai on any plan through a connector. It will not choose your editor for you, and it has never offered anybody a reply boost.
For the record, I still do not know what Radar Search is. At $8 a month, it now comes with a code editor.
PHP2Shell, Railway, Next.js, LiteLLM, eMudhra, Plex, GitLab, Cairn: 13 to 24 October 2026 in order, what the numbers mean, and what the week had in common.
