Cursor

The estimated inference cost of a daily user exceeds the subscription price, so the plan is priced below its own token bill at this volume.

FAIR

The price is mostly buying things that are not the model: evals, data pipelines, integrations, compliance, support, real interface work.

Vendor
Anysphere
Category
Coding
Tier
Pro
Price / month
$20
Est. API cost
$27.98
Est. markup
0.71×
Price checked
11 Aug 2026
Verification
verified
§1 · Billing

What the price actually is

Pro includes a monthly allowance of model requests; use beyond the allowance is billed as usage-based overage on top of the $20. This estimate assumes a user staying inside the included allowance, which is the only comparison the sticker price supports.

§2 · Assumption

The usage this is priced against

A daily user working inside the included allowance: about 250 agent requests a month carrying substantial repository context, plus 8,000 tab completions on a cheap fast model.

Someone using it half as much sees double the multiple. The assumption is the argument — if you disagree with it, the number below is not about you. Change it in the calculator.

§3 · Arithmetic

The cost math, in full

Estimated monthly inference cost

6,250,000 input tokens$18.75

Mid-tier frontier text model at $3.00 / 1M input tokens · 250 agent requests at ~25k tokens of context and ~2k tokens of edits each

500,000 output tokens$7.50

Mid-tier frontier text model at $15.00 / 1M output tokens

16,000,000 input tokens$1.60

Nano text model at $0.10 / 1M input tokens · 8,000 tab completions

320,000 output tokens$0.13

Nano text model at $0.40 / 1M output tokens

Estimated cost$27.98
Price paid (Pro)$20
Estimated markup0.71×

Rates come from a dated rate card of representative published API prices, not from the vendor. Nobody outside these companies knows what they actually pay; volume discounts and in-house serving both push real costs below these figures, which makes every multiple here a floor rather than a ceiling.

§4 · Reasoning

Why this verdict, not the number

A markup below 1× means the arithmetic this site performs stops being the interesting question: at the assumed usage the vendor is not marking up inference, it is absorbing part of it and recovering the difference from lighter users and from usage-based overages. Read the multiple as a statement about the included allowance, not about the company's economics overall — the overage pricing is where heavy users actually pay, and this entry does not model that.

What the price buys besides tokens

  • Orchestration
  • UX craft
  • Scale & infra

Multi-file edits that apply cleanly, an index of the repository kept fresh as you type, retries and diff application that mostly do not corrupt the working tree. The boring hard parts are the product; the model call is the trivial part of an agent request.

§5 · Leaving

What you lose if you leave

Repository indexing you did not have to build, apply-and-review UX for multi-file diffs, and the latency budget that makes tab completion usable rather than annoying.

The honest cheaper path

Aider or Cline with your own API key gets close on the agent loop and costs what the tokens cost. At the assumed volume that is estimated to be more than the subscription, not less.

§6 · Your numbers

Recompute it for yourself

Recompute this for your own usage

Your estimated cost
Your markup
Cost per unit of our assumption

Scaling assumes your usage has the same shape as ours, just more or less of it. If your mix is different — far more output than input, say — the estimate drifts. It is an estimate either way.

§7 · Sources

Where every number came from

Price recorded 11 Aug 2026 · entry last reviewed 11 Aug 2026. Think something here is wrong? File a correction — we publish them, including the ones that embarrass us.