Coding Agent Pricing

Cursor and now Zed have changed their pricing models for coding agents from a request-based flat price towards token-usage-based pricing. The coding agent free lunch is over.

Michael Truell for Cursor on 2025-06-04:

We moved from request-based pricing to $20 of included usage on Pro. We also started to offer unlimited usage of models when Auto is selected. Auto automatically routes to different frontier models based on capacity.

Michael Truell for Cursor on 2025-08-12:

Second, we’re updating our limits on “Auto” for individuals. At your next billing renewal after September 15, Auto will contribute to your included monthly usage at competitive token rates.

Morgan Krey for Zed on 2025-09-24:

We're moving Zed AI from prompt-based limits to token-based pricing.

This is an interesting development in text editor / coding agent access. It looks like these companies wanted to use subscription models, but the underlying LLM providers' token-based pricing proved too complicated to economically abstract it into a subscription model. Both Cursor and Zed report that a small group of customers use a lot of the provided service, and that overall they lost money. Customers will now be required to take care of their usage and pay attention to the pricing of different models.

If LLM performance continues to level off like it appears to be doing (how big of a difference between gpt-4o and gpt-5 was there really), these text editor companies are putting themselves in a hard place. At current performance levels, coding agents can't really be left to their own devices, requiring either careful management of context or a lot of money (as you throw away code, rework poor code, engage additional agents for quality control). Price-conscious customers will be incentivized to choose tools that give them more control over context, that are more transparent about token prices for each available model

Cursor does not currently show the token pricing for their selectable models, providing very little transparency on how much cost will be incurred by a request. It'll be interesting to see how they justify their pricing, when they're basically passing on the underlying pricing — why pay the intermediary if I can go directly to OpenAI or Anthropic. Cursor reportedly charges a 20% markup though they do not state this anywhere^[1], Zed explicitly says they're tacking on a 10% fee, while OpenRouter charges 5.5%. These pricing changes make bringing your own API keys increasingly attractive.

Additional reading: September 15, 2025: The Day the Industry Admitted AI Subscriptions Don't Work