Cursor’s New Pricing Blew My Budget, So I Built a Usage Tracker

When Cursor switched to usage-based pricing, my monthly cost jumped 700% because I rely heavily on Claude. To avoid future surprises, I built and open-sourced a Python-based CLI (also published as a Node package) that tracks real-time token usage for Cursor and Claude Code, syncs to a Django dashboard, and even ranks models globally based on community usage.

In June, Cursor updated its pricing policy and introduced usage-based pricing. All pro users (including me) are now allotted $20 of Sonnet credits and other frontier models at the API price. After running out of allotment, you start paying for each request at API cost. This is a stark change from the seemingly unlimited usage I got before.

I now realize how expensive those requests are. About 3 days into July, I got a warning from Cursor that I would be switched to usage-based pricing (how ...