AI Code Editor Pricing Resets as Cursor Retires Its $20 Pro Plan

The pricing reset of 2026

For most of the AI coding boom, comparing editors came down to a few tidy numbers. Cursor cost $20, Windsurf cost $15, and GitHub Copilot in VS Code cost $10. By November 2026, none of those comparisons holds up. All three products have changed how they bill, two have changed owners or names, and in Cursor's case the subscription is now bundled with a social network.

The biggest change is the newest. Cursor's pricing was rebuilt on October 12, 2026, when SpaceXAI folded the editor into The X Subscription, a single plan that also covers Grok and X.42 New customers now choose from Free, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30, Super at $100, and Ultra at $200.1 The familiar $20 Pro plan is closed to new sign-ups. Premium at $30 is its closest replacement, which works out to a 50% higher entry price for a full-featured working plan.210

Windsurf's change came earlier, and it also left the product with a new name. Cognition swapped Windsurf's credit system for daily and weekly quotas on March 19, 2026. It then renamed the editor Devin Desktop on June 2 and pushed the change out as an over-the-air update.33 VS Code itself is still free. GitHub Copilot, the AI layer most developers add to it, kept its $10 Pro price but moved to usage-based AI Credits on June 1, 2026.2324

What Cursor's $8 plan actually buys

At first glance, Cursor looks cheaper than it used to be. That impression doesn't survive the details. The $8 Plus tier only runs Grok models.42 Cloud agents, Bugbot code reviews and access to non-Grok models start at Premium.10 Even on Premium, Claude, GPT and Gemini aren't covered by the subscription. Those models are billed separately at API list price on every tier from Premium up.102

This matters because the old Cursor plan was built around exactly those third-party models. Before the change, legacy Pro included a pool of Cursor's own model usage plus $20 of "Other Models" usage. Pro+ came with $70 and Ultra with $400.1 The new tiers offer more usage on Cursor's own models, including Grok and Composer, but drop the third-party allowance entirely.2 Cursor tightened its metering even before the acquisition took over pricing. Since August 2026, Auto mode, which older guides called unlimited, draws from a usage pool.4

Subscribers who signed up before the change are protected for now. They keep their current price and features unless they change plans or cancel, and they can still move between eligible legacy tiers such as Pro and Pro+.2 Teams pricing now starts at $30 per user, with seat tiers at $100 and $200.1

Our reading is that this is a strategic shift, not a pricing adjustment. A Cursor subscription is now built to steer developers toward Grok, and Anthropic or OpenAI models become a metered extra. Developers who have tuned their workflows around Claude will pay more and face less predictable bills. One analysis put it plainly: Cursor's case now rests on the editor experience, not on price.10

Windsurf becomes Devin Desktop and loses its price edge

Windsurf spent 2025 as the budget pick. After a December 2025 revamp it undercut Cursor by 25%, with Pro at $15 and Teams at $30 a seat.47 The March overhaul ended that. Pro rose to $20, Teams moved to an $80 monthly base plus $40 per seat, and a $200 Max tier arrived.38 Existing Pro and Teams subscribers were grandfathered at their old prices indefinitely.33

Cognition's stated reason for dropping credits was that a flat credit charged the same for a one-line question and a forty-minute agent session. That pushed users to cram work into oversized prompts.34 The replacement is a token allowance that refreshes daily and weekly. Paid plans can buy extra usage at API rates.34 Critics point out that Cognition doesn't publish the quota sizes. Max is described only as having "significantly higher" limits, so it's hard to know in advance what the extra $180 a month buys.3132 Tab completions stay unlimited on every plan, including Free, so the quota applies mainly to agent work.33

The reaction was mixed. One review describes one-star Trustpilot reviews piling up in the week after the change.36 Another credits Cognition with handling the migration well. It converted unused add-on credits at the price customers originally paid and offered cash refunds to anyone who wanted out.37

The product has changed as well. The Cascade agent reached end-of-life on July 1, 2026, and Devin Local replaced it as the default local agent. Cognition is now pitching the editor as a command center for both local and cloud agents.39 Cognition's in-house SWE models are part of the cost picture too. On paid self-serve plans, SWE-2 was free only through mid-October 2026, and after that it reverts to list token rates.37

Copilot keeps the $10 headline but changes the meter

On sticker price, VS Code with Copilot Pro is still the cheapest paid way to get several frontier models in one editor.42 What changed is what the $10 buys. GitHub retired premium requests and now charges for chat, agents and code review by token consumption, priced at each model's API rate.24 Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions don't use credits.24

GitHub ended up more generous than it first announced. Its April plan said Pro would include $10 in credits and Pro+ $39.24 At launch, the allowances were $15 and $70, and a new $100 Max tier came with $200 in credits.28 Developers had pushed back before launch, arguing they would get less for the same price.24 The bigger allowances look partly like a response to that.

Copilot has also become a host for other companies' agents. VS Code can now run sessions for GitHub's own agent alongside Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex, all drawing on the same credit meter.25

Why many 2026 price comparisons are out of date

Price comparisons published during 2026 disagree, and many of them are stale. Some guides still list Windsurf at $15 and Cursor at $20 with a fixed number of fast requests.46 Others, updated through the autumn, list Cursor's old Hobby, Pro, Pro+ and Ultra lineup as current.47 Only the most recent coverage reflects the October move to The X Subscription.11042 Reporting on ownership also lagged. A September comparison described Cursor as only "reportedly" in acquisition talks with SpaceX/xAI.47 A month later, another outlet said SpaceX had closed its acquisition of Cursor's parent Anysphere about two months before the October repricing.10

Accounts of Windsurf's history differ too. Some reviews say Cognition took over the product in July 2025, after OpenAI's deal fell apart and Google hired the founders.33 Others describe a roughly $250 million acquisition closing in December 2025.3639 These details don't change today's prices, but they're a reminder to treat any undated comparison table with suspicion.

One point every source agrees on: headline prices now set a minimum, not the full cost. Cursor, Devin Desktop and Copilot all fall back on token-metered billing once the included allowance runs out.43430

Lovable and Bolt show the same pattern

Prompt-to-app builders, which target people who would rather not open an IDE at all, show the same pattern in smaller form. Lovable Pro costs $25 a month, or $21 billed annually, for 100 credits. Bolt Pro costs $25 monthly, or $18 billed annually, for 10 million tokens.1219 The two meter work differently. Lovable charges per build request, so lots of back-and-forth gets expensive. Bolt charges by tokens, so long sessions and large projects use more.12 One roundup notes that the headline price is a floor, and that real monthly spend depends on how much you build.14 That's the same lesson as the editor market.

Which editor to choose now

Our assessment is that the IDE market has moved from competing on price to competing on model access. Copilot is the neutral option: the lowest entry price and Claude, GPT and Gemini on a single meter. Devin Desktop has matched Cursor on headline price. Its pitch is now agent orchestration and Cognition's own models, at the cost of quotas it doesn't publish. Cursor is still the editor most teams compare others against.42 But its new owner has turned it into a Grok product with paid access to other models.

For individual developers who mainly want Claude or GPT at a predictable cost, the case for starting with VS Code and Copilot is stronger than it was a year ago.42 Legacy subscribers to Cursor or Windsurf have a good reason to keep their grandfathered plans. Whatever editor you use, it's worth tracking usage for a month before committing to a top tier, because the monthly bill now depends on how heavily you use AI agents, not on the plan you pick.