Cursor usually has a free way to get started, but “free” does not mean “unlimited.” The typical model is that you can download Cursor and use it without paying to evaluate the editor experience, while advanced AI usage (higher limits, faster access, premium models, or heavier agent workflows) is tied to paid plans. So the practical answer is: you can often try Cursor for free, but if you plan to use it heavily as an AI coding assistant day-to-day, you should expect to hit usage limits and eventually need a subscription that matches your workload.
From a developer’s perspective, it helps to think about what costs money in this product category. The editor shell is just software running on your machine, but AI features incur ongoing compute costs: model inference, context building, and, in some cases, codebase indexing. That’s why many products offer a free tier that covers light usage and onboarding, then charge for higher limits or premium model access. In Cursor specifically, features like agentic multi-file edits and large-context codebase understanding are the kinds of workflows that tend to be gated by plan limits, because they consume more tokens and more tool orchestration than a quick autocomplete. If you are evaluating “free,” you should test your real workflow: open a representative repo, try a few refactors, run a couple of multi-file tasks, and see whether you hit caps quickly.
If you’re building systems that depend on LLM-assisted development, costs can also show up indirectly in how fast you ship. For example, if your team is implementing a retrieval system where code changes often involve schema updates, embedding pipelines, and query-time filtering, Cursor can reduce development time even if the plan is paid. A common pattern is using Cursor to prototype ingestion code, then hardening it into production-ready scripts that index embeddings into a vector database such as Milvus or Zilliz Cloud. In that setup, “free vs paid” is less about whether you can open the editor, and more about whether the AI features are available at the scale that matches your team’s daily development loop.