Cursor Hides Cost Data from Usage Page, Sparking User Frustration
Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export
I recently noticed that Cursor replaced dollar amounts with token counts on the usage page, making it impossible to track my daily spending. While the company claims this change prevents confusion for individual plans, many users find it unacceptable for budget management. We are now forced to rely on CSV exports or the spending dashboard to see actual costs, a shift that frustrates teams needing transparent per-user data.
Who cares about tokens? It's irrelevant as it's highly different to each model.
- tosh
I can only recommend to regularly measure how many tokens a harness+model combination uses for a certain task
There are huge token efficiency/bloat differences between agents while working on the same tasks, using the same model, in the same environment
Yesterday I ran 10 agentic tasks using GPT 5.6 Sol in an ubuntu 26.04 vm a couple of times with different harnesses and got vastly different token usage.
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
| Harness | API total | Input | Cached | Uncached | Output |
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
| smol | 172,807 | 142,334 | 8,704 | 133,630 | 30,473 |
| Pi | 427,211 | 392,767 | 137,216 | 255,551 | 34,444 |
| OpenCode | 1,564,429 | 1,523,957 | 1,204,736 | 319,221 | 40,472 |
| Codex | 3,005,744 | 2,953,154 | 2,649,344 | 303,810 | 52,590 |
| Hermes | 3,856,611 | 3,808,231 | 3,167,232 | 640,999 | 48,380 |
| Claude Code | 5,073,137 | 5,029,969 | 4,587,008 | 442,961 | 43,168 |
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
https://x.com/__tosh/status/2083593799872237680
I'm not surprised that Claude Code is not optimized for an OpenAI model but I was still quite shocked re how much of a difference the harness makes.
Disclaimer: I'm working on 'smol' which is a minimalist harness but it's really nothing special, just a minimal system prompt, no skills files, […]
- aroman
I was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.
These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.
Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?
- jonjohnsen
(I work at Cursor)
You can still see what you’re billed on the Spending page. We did accidentally break dollar costs in the Usage CSV export yesterday while cleaning up an old feature flag. That was not intentional and the CSV export is fixed now.
That feature flag also showed a dollar usage graph to some self-serve users. The confusing part was included plan usage shown as $, which is not what you’re billed (on-demand usage is). Some people read it as actual spend, so we decided to remove that graph.
- xvxvx
Elon will be paying his staff in tokens in the future. Grocery stores will have on-demand pricing shown in tokens, and prices will change from the time you pick up the product and you pay at the checkout. It’s Ok, Elon said money won’t exist soon anyway…
- slashdave
Cursor achieved fast adoption by making it simple to move from Visual Studio code.
Double-edged sword. It is also simple to move back to VS code and agent extensions.
- jjice
Saw this at work yesterday. Absolute insanity to do something as user hostile as removing the cost of the service. There's no way to attempt to brand this as anything but negative for the user, and positive for the company.
Gotta justify a $60B purchase of an IDE and (at the time) a single, decent model.
- ungovernableCat
Dead company, purchased completely via SpaceX stock. Hope it doesn't crash more before the cliff period ends.
- bluerooibos
They also just ended their referral program without any announcement or warning - referrals page on my account just disappeared, all whilst I'm sending them free traffic.
I guess this is to be expected of a now Elon Musk (that Nazi salute guy) owned company. It's a shame - the product was great.