Cursor alternatives after the third-party model change: what the same month costs
Tools in this post
Since 12 October 2026, no new Cursor plan includes any Claude or GPT usage: it is billed at API list price on top of a $30, $100 or $200 subscription. A month that used the old Pro+ allowance, $70 of Claude at list price, now costs $100 on Cursor Premium. As of 21 October I count eight realistic replacements. For most people leaving over Claude costs, GitHub Copilot Pro+ covers that same month for $39, as long as GitHub keeps its variable "flex" credits.
Cursor's new plans bill Claude and GPT from the first token
Cursor's new plans arrived as "the X Subscription", announced on x.ai on 12 October 2026, two months after SpaceX closed its purchase of Cursor's maker. The tiers are Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200. Each paid tier includes a weekly usage pool shared with Grok, and none includes third-party models.
Plus runs only Grok and Cursor's own Composer models. Premium and above can use Claude, GPT and Gemini, billed at API list price from prepaid credit; individual plans pay no markup, and Teams seats pay $0.25 per million tokens on top. Cursor publishes the pool sizes only as multiples of Plus (4x, 15x, 50x), never in tokens or dollars.
Cursor's plan cards on 21 October 2026; Ultra at $200 appears only in the comparison table below them. Screenshot of cursor.com/pricing by Cursor.
Existing subscribers are not moved yet. Cursor staff wrote on the forum that switching is opt-in, that old plans keep their third-party usage for now, and that a switch is permanent. Cursor's own GPT supply is ending too: OpenAI's help page proposes 12 November 2026 and says the official termination date is not yet confirmed. Your own OpenAI key or the Codex extension keeps GPT available inside Cursor's editor.
The same Claude month now costs $50 or $100 on Cursor
Under the old plans, Cursor Pro at $20 included $20 of third-party usage and Pro+ at $60 included $70, according to Cursor's own docs as archived on 18 August 2026. The same Claude month on Premium is the $30 fee plus usage at list price: $50 for the Pro month, $100 for the Pro+ month.
Cursor dropped those dollar figures from its docs in late August, so their October values rest on the archive and users' accounts. At Anthropic's list prices, Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, and Claude Opus 5.5 twice that. One agent session of 3 million input tokens and 150,000 output tokens costs $7.50 on Sonnet and $15 on Opus without caching, so $70 buys about nine such Sonnet sessions a month.
How the eight options were picked
An option made the list if it can take the slot Cursor held: an AI editor or coding agent that runs Claude or GPT at agent scale, with a price published on 21 October 2026. I left out Roo Code, whose repository was archived on 15 May 2026, and Google Antigravity, whose pricing page does not mention Claude.
JetBrains AI showed me prices only in euros, so it is in the "which one" list at the end rather than the table. Three of the eight cannot be priced for a Claude month: Claude Code and Devin publish no token figure for their allowance, and Codex runs no Claude. Prices below are monthly, in US dollars, before tax.
Eight tools that take Cursor's slot
GitHub Copilot
- Price: Pro $10, Pro+ $39, Max $100. Since 1 June 2026, Pro includes 1,500 AI credits ($15 of usage), Pro+ 7,000 ($70), Max 20,000 ($200).
- Claude: Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 charged at Anthropic's list prices, per the models and pricing docs.
- Platform: VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, Neovim, Zed, CLI. Proprietary.
- Keeps: unlimited completions on paid plans, a cloud agent and code review from Pro.
- Pick it when you want an editor with inline completion and a monthly pool counted in list-price dollars. Part of each pool is "flex" credit that GitHub says can change; only $10, $39 and $100 of it is fixed.
Claude Code
- Price: Claude Code comes with Claude Pro at $20, Max 5x at $100 and Max 20x at $200.
- Claude: a 5-hour session limit plus a weekly limit, with no token or dollar figure published.
- Platform: terminal, VS Code and JetBrains extensions, desktop, web. Proprietary. Latest release v2.1.306, 21 October 2026.
- Pick it when your Cursor month was mostly Claude and you can work inside 5-hour and weekly windows. One Reddit user who came from Cursor's old $200 Ultra used Pro's weekly limit in two to three days.
OpenAI Codex
- Price: OpenAI Codex comes with ChatGPT Plus at $20 and Pro from $100.
- Models: GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Luna. No Claude.
- Platform: CLI (Apache-2.0), IDE extension that also runs inside Cursor, web. Latest CLI release 15 October 2026.
- Pick it when your Cursor month ran on GPT and you lose it after the proposed 12 November cutoff. OpenAI's pricing page estimates 15 to 160 local GPT-6.1 Sol messages per 5 hours on Plus, with weekly limits on top.
Zed
- Price: Zed Personal is free with your own API keys; Pro is $10 with unlimited edit predictions and $5 of tokens, then API list price plus 10%.
- Agents: its own agent, or Claude Code and Codex running inside it on your existing subscriptions.
- Platform: native editor on macOS, Linux and Windows. Open source. Latest release v1.24.4, 20 October 2026.
- Pick it when you want a fast editor and plan to run Claude Code or Codex in it.
Cline
- Price: Cline is free; you bring an API key and pay the provider's list price.
- Platform: VS Code extension, CLI, desktop app. Apache-2.0. Extension v4.1.25, 16 October 2026.
- Pick it when you want pay-as-you-go at list price inside VS Code with no subscription at all.
Kilo Code
- Price: Kilo Code is free with your own key, or uses Kilo's gateway at provider rates with no markup and a 5% fee on credit purchases.
- Platform: VS Code, JetBrains, CLI. MIT. Latest release v7.8.15, 19 October 2026.
- Note: Kilo is offering teams free Enterprise for the rest of their Cursor contract, up to a year, in its own post on HackerNoon of 19 October, if claimed by the end of November.
- Pick it when you want one router across many providers, or a team migration with a vendor subsidy.
OpenCode
- Price: OpenCode is free with your own key. Its $10 Go plan covers 29 models, including Claude Haiku 5.5, but not Sonnet or Opus.
- Platform: terminal, desktop app, IDE extension. MIT. Latest release v1.19.3, 16 October 2026.
- Pick it when you want a terminal agent on cheap open models for a flat $10, or on your own Anthropic key.
Devin, formerly Windsurf
- Price: windsurf.com's pricing page now redirects to Devin's, where Pro costs $20 and Max $200.
- Claude: quotas include Claude, OpenAI and Gemini models and refresh daily and weekly, with no figures published; extra usage is billed at API pricing.
- Platform: Devin Desktop editor, cloud agents. Proprietary.
- Pick it when you want the closest all-in-one match to Cursor (Tab, cloud agents, many vendors) at $20, and accept limits nobody has published.
The same month priced on each option
The table prices two months: a light one that used the old Pro allowance ($20 of Claude at list price) and a heavy one that used the old Pro+ allowance ($70). Each cell is the plan fee plus any usage above what the plan includes, at that plan's rates.
| Option | Plan fee | Claude included | $20 month | $70 month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor legacy Pro, if you kept it | $20 | $20 | $20 | $70 |
| Cursor legacy Pro+, if you kept it | $60 | $70 | $60 | $60 |
| Cursor Premium | $30 | none | $50 | $100 |
| GitHub Copilot Pro | $10 | $15 | $15 | $65 |
| GitHub Copilot Pro+ | $39 | $70 | $39 | $39 |
| Zed Pro | $10 | $5, then list +10% | $27 | $82 |
| Cline, OpenCode or Kilo Code with your own key | $0 | none | $20 | $70 |
| Kilo Code through its gateway | $0 | none, 5% fee | $21 | $73.50 |
| Claude Code (Pro $20, Max $100) | $20 or $100 | not published | n/a | n/a |
| Devin Pro | $20 | not published | n/a | n/a |
If GitHub cut the flex credits to zero, Copilot Pro+ would cost $70 for the heavy month, the same as paying list price yourself. The cheapest move of all is not to switch: a legacy Pro+ subscriber still gets $70 of Claude for $60 until Cursor gives notice.
What do you lose when you leave Cursor?
Leaving Cursor costs three things: rules written in its own format, the Tab completion model, and cloud agents with Bugbot review. AGENTS.md is the part that moves. Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Zed, Cline, Kilo Code and OpenCode all read an AGENTS.md file. None of them loads .cursor/rules/*.mdc on its own: OpenCode can be pointed at the files, and Claude Code's /init reads them once to write a CLAUDE.md.
| Cursor feature | Portable? | Nearest replacement |
|---|---|---|
Project rules in .cursor/rules/*.mdc |
No. Zed and Cline read only the old single .cursorrules file |
Move always-on rules into AGENTS.md; path rules into Claude Code's .claude/rules/ or Copilot's .github/instructions/ |
| Tab completion | No | Copilot completions, Zed edit predictions, Devin Tab. Claude Code and Codex have none |
| Cloud agents and automations | No | Copilot's cloud agent, Codex cloud tasks, Devin's cloud agents |
| Bugbot review | No | Copilot code review |
Move the rules before you cancel: copy every rule that applies everywhere into AGENTS.md, and the layer guide for AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md and skills covers what goes where. Delete .cursorrules too, since Zed reads it ahead of AGENTS.md and ignores AGENTS.md while it exists. One Reddit user ran /init in Claude Code on a Cursor project, and it wrote a CLAUDE.md from the existing rules and docs.
Staying on Cursor with Composer is cheapest if your month was Cursor's own models
Staying on Cursor is the cheapest answer when most of your month ran on Composer, Grok or Auto rather than Claude. Composer 2.5 is in the included pool on every paid plan, including the $8 Plus, and Cursor says each new plan gives at least twice the Cursor-model usage of the legacy plan it replaces. Pool sizes are unpublished, so that is Cursor's claim, not a measurement.
Above the pool, Composer 2.5 costs $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output, a quarter of Sonnet 5.5's list price; its cached input is the exception, at twice Sonnet's. The example session above costs $1.88 on Composer against $7.50 on Sonnet. Paid plans also keep unlimited Tab, which the alternatives without an editor do not replace. The Composer, Grok and Opus comparison covers which work each model holds up on.
On Stackness, 7 public profiles without bots list Cursor as of 21 October 2026 (data sources). Four of them also list Claude Code, two OpenCode, and one each GitHub Copilot and Windsurf. The numbers are small, and they show Cursor kept next to a Claude subscription more often than replaced by one. The rest of the editors and IDEs developers list are in the catalog.
Which one for which month
- You kept legacy Pro or Pro+: stay. Nothing on this list beats $70 of Claude for $60 while Cursor honours it.
- Your month was mostly Composer, Grok or Tab: Cursor Plus at $8 or Premium at $30.
- About $70 of Claude, and you want an editor with completion: GitHub Copilot Pro+ at $39.
- About $20 of Claude: GitHub Copilot Pro at $15 for the month, or Cline with your own key at $20.
- Mostly Claude, in the terminal, and steady weekly use: Claude Code on Pro, then Max when the weekly limit bites.
- Mostly GPT: Codex on ChatGPT Plus, before Cursor's GPT access ends.
- You want a fast editor and already pay for Claude or ChatGPT: Zed, running Claude Code or Codex inside it.
- You live in JetBrains IDEs: JetBrains AI, whose credits are charged at API rates with no surcharge, or Copilot's JetBrains plugin.
- A team with a Cursor contract: read Kilo's free Enterprise offer, and check that the team's rules already live in AGENTS.md.
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