The original comparison ran in February and asked whether Cursor's $20/month was worth it over free VS Code. Six months later the pricing tiers are still $0/$20/$60/$200, but Cursor renamed its plans, shifted what the free tier actually gives you, and published more detail on how it handles code privacy. Worth updating before anyone budgets or approves this off the old numbers.
Pricing, Confirmed and One Name Change
Cursor's pricing page still lists Hobby (free), Pro ($20/month), Pro+ ($60/month), and Ultra ($200/month) at identical dollar amounts to February. The one change: the team tier that used to show up as "Business" now shows as Teams, still $40/user/month, still bundled with SAML/OIDC SSO and centralized billing. Functionally nothing moved, it's a rename, but if you're searching Cursor's site for "Business" expecting to find the team plan, you won't. Enterprise pricing remains custom, quoted through sales, adding pooled usage and invoice/PO billing on top of what Teams offers.
The free Hobby tier changed in a way that matters more than the name swap. In February it was framed around a hard number, roughly 2,000 completions and 50 "slow" agent requests a month. Cursor's current pricing page describes Hobby simply as "Limited Agent requests" with no published number attached. That's a real shift in how the company talks about its own free tier, moving away from a countable metric toward a vaguer cap it can adjust without updating marketing copy. Practically, expect the free tier to run out faster in any given month than it did when the number was fixed and published.
Why the Limits Language Changed
Cursor's whole pitch has moved from "autocomplete with AI" toward "AI agents that write and edit code across your project." The product page leads with Agents and Composer, not tab completion. Once usage is measured by how much agentic work a request triggers rather than how many single-line completions you accept, a flat "2,000 completions" number stops making sense, an agent run that edits twelve files consumes wildly more compute than accepting one autocomplete suggestion. Vague limits are the honest consequence of a genuinely different usage pattern, not just a way to quietly tighten the free tier, though it does have that effect too.
What Hasn't Changed
Pro at $20/month still gets you unlimited completions, 500 fast requests a month, and access to both Claude and GPT-4-class models inside the editor. That's unchanged from February and remains the tier most solo developers who commit to Cursor actually land on. Pro+ at $60 and Ultra at $200 exist for people running agent workloads heavy enough to burn through Pro's fast-request allowance regularly, mostly developers who've built agent-driven workflows into daily use rather than occasional autocomplete.
Cursor is still built on VS Code, still compatible with most VS Code extensions, and the interface still feels immediately familiar to anyone coming from Microsoft's editor. That was the whole value proposition in February: get the AI layer without relearning your tools. Nothing about that has changed, and it's still the single biggest reason developers try Cursor instead of bolting Copilot onto plain VS Code.
Code Privacy, the Detail Worth Checking Before Rollout
This is the part I'd push back on if a team brought Cursor to me for approval without reading the fine print. Cursor's documented privacy settings confirm that by default, code snippets sent to the model provider can be retained briefly for abuse monitoring and to improve the product, unless the org turns on Privacy Mode. Privacy Mode is available on every paid tier and, per Cursor's security page, guarantees code is not stored beyond the request needed to generate a response. It's opt-in, not the default, which means an individual developer signing up for Pro on a personal card without IT involvement may be sending proprietary code through a config that a security team would never approve if asked directly. That was true in February too, but it's worth restating every time this comparison gets refreshed, because it's the detail most likely to bite a company that let developers self-serve Cursor licenses without a rollout policy.
For any regulated environment, financial services, healthcare, defense-adjacent work, Privacy Mode should be a mandatory setting enforced at the Teams or Enterprise tier, not something left to individual developer discretion. Enterprise adds admin-enforced Privacy Mode across the org, which is the correct default for any company past the five-or-six-developer threshold where centralized management starts paying for itself anyway.
GitHub Copilot Is Still the Free Alternative Worth Naming
GitHub Copilot's pricing starts at $10/month for Individual, half of Cursor's Pro tier, and integrates directly into unmodified VS Code rather than requiring a fork. Copilot's agent features have caught up considerably since February, though Cursor's Composer still has the edge for multi-file refactors in most head-to-head Reddit threads I've read on r/programming and r/ChatGPTCoding. If your team is already standardized on vanilla VS Code and doesn't want to manage a second editor distribution across every developer machine, Copilot at $10/month remains the lower-friction choice. If multi-file agentic editing is the actual workflow you're buying for, Cursor's $20 tier still does more of it, more reliably, than Copilot did as of this refresh.
The Free Tier Question, Revisited
Six months ago the advice was: try Hobby, see how fast you burn through the limit, upgrade to Pro once it stops being enough. That advice holds, but temper expectations now that the limit isn't a published number. Don't plan a team pilot around "2,000 completions should last a sprint," because that specific commitment no longer appears on Cursor's own pricing page. Budget for Pro from day one if the team has more than two or three developers testing simultaneously, the free tier is built for individual evaluation, not parallel team trials.
Cost at Real Team Size
A 10-developer team on Cursor Teams runs $400/month ($40 times 10), with SSO, centralized billing, and admin-enforced privacy settings included. The same team on individual Pro licenses runs $200/month ($20 times 10) but loses centralized admin, SSO, and enforced Privacy Mode entirely, meaning IT has no visibility into who's actually using their seat, no way to enforce access policy, and no guarantee anyone turned on the privacy setting that matters most. For any company with more than a handful of developers and an actual security team, Teams' $200/month premium over ad hoc Pro licenses buys real administrative control, not just a nicer invoice. Skip it only if you're under five developers and don't have compliance requirements forcing centralized access management.
The Recommendation, Confirmed
Nothing here reverses February's verdict. Cursor at $20/month is worth it if your daily work includes real agentic edits, multi-file refactors, or codebase-wide changes where Composer's context handling saves real time. Stick with free VS Code plus GitHub Copilot at $10/month if your usage is mostly single-line completion and you don't want a second editor to maintain. Teams at $40/user only makes sense once you need SSO, centralized billing, and enforced Privacy Mode, which for most companies means once you cross five or six developers on the platform, and it's the tier I'd insist on before letting a security-conscious team run Cursor against anything proprietary.
For a closer look at how Cursor stacks up against Copilot specifically feature by feature, the Cursor vs GitHub Copilot comparison breaks down the AI model differences in more depth, and the GitHub Copilot pricing breakdown covers Copilot's own tier structure if that's the direction your team is leaning.