An editor built around AI assistance rather than a plugin bolted onto one. You are adopting the editor as well as the model, which makes this a larger decision than installing an extension and a smaller one than replacing your toolchain.
Two figures decide this, and only one of them is the price
The first is what a seat costs, and Anysphere publishes it in a plain table on its own help pages and docs: an individual lineup that starts at Pro, US$20 a month, with Pro+ and Ultra above it, and a free Hobby plan under it. The second is what happens once whatever the seat includes is spent, and the vendor's help pages answer that in writing too.
Read the second answer before the first. Included usage is pooled per month into two buckets, one for Cursor's own models (Grok and Composer) and one for third-party models at their listed API price, and on the paid plans both columns are marked Included. When the included amount runs out, on-demand usage can be switched on and is billed at those same API rates with no markup. What a seat buys is therefore access to a monthly allowance whose size is described but not enumerated in either pool, plus a published path for going past it.
The free plan is the one thing on this page with no number behind it. Anysphere's word on the Hobby card is Limited, applied to Agent requests, and no digit appears beside it on the pricing page or in the help docs. That is a description of what the card says rather than of what the plan does, and our methodology is deliberate about the difference.
GitHub Copilot is the other tool in AI Coding, and it is the comparison most readers want. The two side by side is where the free-tier difference is decided, because one of them answers with numbers and the other does not. The Cursor review reads the seat price, the pooled usage and the on-demand rate off the same docs, and weighs what the seat does not put in writing.