Is Cursor free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Verified on cursor.com 2026-07-29. Hobby is free with limited Agent requests. Pro is $20/month and includes $20 of third-party model usage; Pro+ is $60/month with $70 included; Ultra is $200/month with $400 included. Teams runs $40/user/month for a Standard seat and $120/user/month for Premium; Enterprise is custom. Usage past the included allowance is billed at standard API rates, so the real monthly figure tracks how hard you drive the agent — the seat price is a floor, not a ceiling.
When paying is still the right call
Genuinely: if the agent is earning its keep, Cursor is one of the most polished implementations of this idea available, and every alternative here asks you to assemble more of it yourself. Stay if Tab completion is core to how you work — none of the open agents below ship inline autocomplete, and that is the single biggest capability gap. Stay if you would rather pay one vendor than maintain a client plus a provider account plus your own billing. Stay if your team is already on Teams seats with SSO, admin-enforced Privacy Mode and usage analytics, because rebuilding that governance yourself is real work. And stay if you simply don't want to think about model routing — the included allowance handles it. At $20/month, Pro is also not expensive against an hour of developer time; the cost objection bites mainly at Pro+, Ultra, or across a lot of seats. A pending change of ownership is a reason to re-evaluate on your normal cycle, not a reason to move today.
What you are locked into
Low on your files, real on your workflow. Your code is just files in git — nothing about Cursor's format traps it, and uninstalling leaves nothing to migrate. What is harder to replace is the environment you have tuned: rules, skills, MCP configuration, agent behaviour, and the editor muscle memory itself. Two architectural facts are worth knowing before you commit. Every request routes through Anysphere's backend even when you supply your own API key, so there is no configuration that keeps a request on your network. And third-party extensions come from the Open VSX registry, not Microsoft's marketplace, so an extension you depend on may simply not be listed. On data: with Privacy Mode enabled Cursor states none of your code is stored by it or any third party and that it holds zero-data-retention agreements with its model providers; with Privacy Mode off it may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions and code snippets to improve its models. Codebase indexing uploads chunks to compute embeddings, and the embeddings plus metadata such as file names and hashes may be retained.
If you would rather not pay: Cline
Cline
The open-source agent that lives in the editor you already have.
Free and open source (Apache-2.0) — you pay only your model provider. Optional prepaid Cline credits and a paid enterprise tier exist; bring-your-own-key needs no account.
See all 5 Cursor alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Anysphere, Inc. before you commit. More ai coding assistants decisions on Macrostack.