Editorial note. Figures are from cursor.com/pricing and Cursor's account docs as of this writing (September 2026). Cursor is not affiliated with Sonic AI and has revised its plans several times in the last year — reconfirm before you quote this to anyone. This post is about the pricing model, which has been stable even when the numbers moved.
Cursor is the AI code editor most engineering teams have tried by now, and its pricing is the clearest example of a model that has become the default for AI products: a seat you pay for every month, which comes with a pool of usage, and pay-as-you-go beyond it. If you are launching a product with the same shape — a subscription that includes an allowance of something expensive to serve — Cursor's bill is the one to study.
What Cursor charges
| Plan | Price | Included usage | Beyond the pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $0 | A limited number of agent requests | Upgrade |
| Pro | $20 / month | A monthly pool of model usage (roughly the plan price, at API rates) | On-demand usage, billed in arrears |
| Pro+ | $60 / month | A larger pool (about 3× Pro) | On-demand usage |
| Ultra | $200 / month | A much larger pool (about 20× Pro) | On-demand usage |
| Teams Standard | $40 / user / month | Per-seat pool, centralised billing | On-demand usage; a per-token platform rate applies on third-party models |
| Teams Premium | $120 / user / month | Bigger pool per seat | On-demand usage |
| Enterprise | Custom | Pooled usage across the org, invoice / PO billing, SCIM seats | Negotiated |
Two things are true at once on every paid plan: the seat price is fixed and recurring, and the included usage is measured in what the underlying models cost — Cursor's docs say on-demand usage continues "at the same API rates" once the pool is consumed.
The pricing model underneath
Strip the brand away and this is three catalog lines, not one:
- A seat —
$20 × seats, billed in advance each month. Adds and removes mid-month are seat events. - An included usage allowance attached to that seat — a quota of model spend the seat can draw on before anything extra is charged. In billing terms this is a prepaid slab: the plan price already covers
Nunits per period. - Overage — everything above the slab, metered and billed in arrears at a per-unit rate.
Cursor's twist is that the unit is dollars of model cost rather than requests, and that Teams and Enterprise pool the allowance across seats instead of holding it per person. Both are configuration, not new models: the meter aggregates cost across the organisation's users, and the slab is sized per seat or per org.
What a Teams invoice looks like
Take a 12-seat Teams Standard customer, one month, where the org's model usage came to $610 against a pooled allowance of 12 × $40 = $480 (illustrative — Cursor's actual pool sizing is on the plan page):
| Line | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teams Standard seat — Sept 1–30 (in advance) | 12 | $40.00 | $480.00 |
| Seat added Sept 19 — remaining 12 of 30 days | 1 | $40.00 × 12/30 | $16.00 |
| Model usage — included in plan | $480 of $610 | — | $0.00 |
| Model usage — on-demand (in arrears) | $130 | 1.00 | $130.00 |
| Total | $626.00 |
Notice that the seat and the usage sit on one invoice with two different timings: the seat is in advance for the coming month, the usage is in arrears for the month that just ended. That is the single most common thing a home-grown billing setup gets wrong — it bills both in advance, or both in arrears, and the numbers stop tying out to the product's own usage dashboard.
Where this gets hard to bill
- The included pool resets, the seats don't. A seat added on the 19th brings a prorated seat charge and a prorated allowance for the rest of the period. If your system only prorates the money, the customer gets a full month of usage for twelve days of seat.
- Pooling changes what "over" means. Per-seat pools can leave one heavy user over and eleven under; a pooled allowance nets them. The contract has to say which, and the meter has to aggregate at the right level.
- Usage arrives after the seat is billed. In-arrears overage means the invoice for September is not final until the usage feed for September is closed. Idempotent ingestion matters here — a re-sent usage file must not double the overage line.
- Overage is priced at cost. When the rate is "API price", the price list is external and changes. The catalog needs a rate that can be revised for the next period without rewriting issued invoices.
Billing this shape on Sonic AI
On Sonic the Cursor model is a product with three list prices on one billing schedule: a seat-based line (per-seat rate, in advance, proration policy for mid-period adds), a usage slab line that carries the included allowance per commitment period, and the slab's overage rate billed in arrears on the same meter. Seats come in as snapshots from whatever system holds the roster; usage lands through a usage template or a direct Postgres sync, with idempotency so a replayed feed never bills twice. The seat line and the usage lines are generated onto the same invoice from the same billing schedule, each with its own in-advance / in-arrears timing.
See usage & seats for the mechanics, or the deeper reads on seat-based billing and usage-based billing.
If you price like Cursor
Before you ship a seat-plus-pool price, be able to answer these from your billing system, not a spreadsheet:
- Is the allowance per seat or pooled, and does a mid-period seat add bring a prorated allowance?
- Is overage billed in arrears on the same invoice as the next period's seats, or as a separate document?
- What happens to unused allowance — it lapses (Cursor) or rolls forward (ElevenLabs)?
- Can the overage rate change next period without touching issued invoices?
Bring the price sheet to a demo — we would rather build your exact plan ladder than talk in the abstract.
Similar pricing models
A seat with an included usage pool and on-demand overage is now the default for AI products: GitHub Copilot (seat plus premium-request allowance), Lovable, Replit, Windsurf and Intercom's Fin (seats plus a per-resolution fee) all bill this shape. Take away the seat and it is ElevenLabs; take away the pool and it is Slack; take away both and it is OpenAI.
Related terms: seat-based billing, overage, in advance vs in arrears, proration.