Is Cursor AI free?
Yes — Cursor's Hobby plan is free forever with no credit card, giving you Agent, Chat, and Tab completions on the Auto model. But Cursor no longer publishes the exact limits; its own docs just say 'Limited.' Any blog quoting a precise free-tier number is repeating an obsolete figure. Paid plans start at $20/month. As of 2026-07.
Why — the first-principles explanation
The honest answer has two halves: yes it's free, and no one outside Cursor knows exactly how free.
Start with why a free tier exists at all here, because it's not the usual software story. Normal software costs nearly nothing to serve one more user — the code is already written, so a free tier is basically a marketing expense. AI coding tools break that math completely. Every Tab suggestion and every agent request runs inference on a GPU that costs real money, every single time. A heavy free user isn't a rounding error; they're a recurring bill. You can see this priced right in Cursor's own docs: the Auto router runs at fixed token rates of $1.25 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens. Free users burn those tokens too — Cursor just eats it.
That single fact explains everything strange about the free tier. It explains why Cursor's docs describe the Hobby plan's limits only as "Limited" rather than a number. A published number is a promise you have to honor even as model costs and usage patterns shift under you; a vague word is a dial you can turn quietly. It also explains why every specific figure you'll find in blog posts — the old "2,000 completions and 50 slow premium requests" is the famous one — is a fossil. Those numbers were real once, got scraped into a thousand articles, and are now repeated years past their expiry by people who never checked. The absence of a published number is the actual finding here, not a gap in the research.
It also explains what the free tier gives you: core features on the Auto model, which is Cursor's router that balances intelligence, cost, and reliability. Not "the best model available" — the one that's economically sane to give away. Paying doesn't unlock secret features so much as it buys you a bigger inference budget and access to frontier models.
So the practical read: free is genuinely enough to evaluate whether Cursor fits how you work, and enough for occasional or hobby use. It is not built to be a full-time professional workflow. If you use it daily, you'll hit the wall, and the wall moves.
An example that makes it click
It's the free samples at a bakery, not the free maps app on your phone.
The maps app costs the company essentially nothing whether ten people use it or ten million — so it stays free, forever, unlimited. But every sample at the bakery is real flour and real oven time. The baker will happily hand you one, because a taste sells loaves. They'll never post a sign saying "exactly four samples per customer," because on a busy Saturday the answer is one and on a slow Tuesday it's three. That's Cursor's free tier. Real, generous enough to judge the bread, deliberately unnumbered, and quietly adjustable — because someone is paying for the flour.
Key facts
- Cursor's Hobby plan is free and requires no credit card, and is listed with 'Limited' included API usage on Cursor's official pricing docs (as of 2026-07).
- The free Hobby plan includes Agent, Chat, and Tab completions using the Auto model — Cursor does not publish the specific request or completion caps, describing them only as 'Limited Agent requests' and 'Limited Tab completions'.
- Paid individual plans as of 2026-07: Pro $20/mo (includes $20 of API usage), Pro+ $60/mo (includes $70), Ultra $200/mo (includes $400). Teams Standard is $40/user/mo and Teams Premium is $120/user/mo.
- Auto's fixed token rates are $1.25 per 1M input tokens, $6.00 per 1M output tokens, and $0.25 per 1M cache-read tokens, regardless of which model it selects.
- Cursor discontinued new sign-ups for its legacy student discount on June 25, 2026, citing fraud; existing redeemers keep their rate until their plan expires, then continue at the regular $20/month Pro rate.
- Cursor estimates typical spend: daily Tab users 'always stay within $20', while daily Agent users typically run $60–$100/mo in total usage.
- Overage is never automatic: on-demand usage must be explicitly enabled, so a free or Pro user cannot be silently billed past their plan.
Check whether a free tier or trial is available, then confirm current credits and limits.
▶ The 60-second explainer (script)
Is Cursor free? Yes — and here's the part nobody tells you. Cursor's Hobby plan is free forever, no credit card, and you get Agent, Chat, and Tab completions using the Auto model. But how much can you actually do on it? Cursor doesn't say. Their own documentation lists the free plan's limits as, quote, 'Limited.' That's the whole number. So if you find a blog post confidently telling you it's two thousand completions and fifty slow requests — that's a fossil. It was true once, got copied into a thousand articles, and nobody went back to check. Now, why won't they publish a number? Because of how these tools work. Regular software costs nothing to serve one more user, so free tiers are just marketing. But every single Tab suggestion runs on a GPU that costs real money. Cursor's own docs price the Auto model at a dollar twenty-five per million input tokens. Free users burn those tokens too — Cursor just eats the bill. A published limit is a promise you have to keep while your costs move around. The word 'limited' is a dial you can quietly turn. So the practical answer: free is genuinely enough to find out if Cursor fits how you work. It's not built to be your full-time daily driver. That starts at twenty dollars a month.
What authoritative sources say
People also ask
How many free requests do you actually get?
Cursor doesn't publish it. Its docs and pricing page both say only 'Limited.' That's not an oversight in this answer — it's the current state of the company's disclosure, and it lets them adjust the ceiling without breaking a stated promise.
Is the free plan a trial that expires?
No. Hobby is a permanent free tier, not a countdown. You're limited by usage volume rather than by a clock.
What do I actually gain by paying $20?
Mostly budget, not features. Pro includes $20 of API usage plus a larger first-party model pool and access to frontier models, rather than the Auto router alone.
Is there still a student discount?
Not for new sign-ups. Cursor closed the legacy student discount to new applicants on June 25, 2026 after fraud problems. Students can get credits through campus events, and researchers and educators can request credits via a form.
Are there free alternatives without usage caps?
Not meaningfully, and the reason is structural: every request costs real GPU money. Any tool offering 'unlimited' free AI coding is either rate-limiting you invisibly, routing you to a cheap model, or subsidizing you temporarily.