Cursor's pricing help says all Auto modes bill at the list price of the model chosen for each request. On Teams and Enterprise, a third-party route also adds a $0.25 Cursor Token Rate per million input, output, and cached tokens. Cursor calls the three modes Cost, Balance, and Intelligence.
Cursor's Auto modes
Cursor launched Cursor Router for Teams and Enterprise on 2026-07-22. The router classifies each request by task type and complexity, then selects a model from its pool. The mode changes the routing preference:
- Cost keeps the previous Auto routing logic and optimizes token spend.
- Balance trades off intelligence, speed, and cost.
- Intelligence routes harder work toward more capable models.
Cost is a routing choice, not a separate flat-rate billing formula in the current documentation. Cursor's pricing help and Models & Pricing page both say that all Auto modes bill at the list price of the model selected for that request. A third-party selection also incurs the Cursor Token Rate on Teams and Enterprise.
Cursor's model pools and Token Rate
Cursor's Models & Pricing page describes two usage pools. The Cursor Models pool currently lists Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5. The Other Models pool contains third-party models, including models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.
Cursor's separate Token Rate help page says first-party Cursor models, including Grok and Composer, are exempt from the $0.25 rate. Read together, those pages support treating Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5 as exempt while they remain in the Cursor Models pool. The exemption is a property of Cursor's model classification, not a general rule for every model with a similar name.
Auto route | Model charge | Cursor Token Rate on Teams and Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
Cursor Model, such as Grok 4.7 | The routed model's published list price | Exempt |
Third-party model, such as Claude Sonnet 5.5 | The routed model's published list price | +$0.25 per million eligible tokens |
For a simple comparison, assume a request uses 1 million input tokens and 1 million output tokens, with no cache tokens. Cursor's published table lists Grok 4.7 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, so the model charge is $8 and the Token Rate is $0. The same-sized request on Claude Sonnet 5.5 is $2 plus $10, and the 2 million eligible tokens add $0.50 in Token Rate, for $12.50 before any plan allowance or on-demand setting is applied.
Cursor's plan rollout and admin control
As of 2026-10-06, Cursor's help page says Router is for Teams and Enterprise, with individual plans scheduled for a later update. Enterprise teams start with Router off and an administrator must opt in. Cursor's Router documentation also says Grok 4.6 must remain enabled for Router to work.
On 2026-09-29, a Cursor staff reply said Router was still limited to Teams and Enterprise while pricing and usage calculations for Pro, Pro+, and Ultra were being worked out. Until that rollout changes, individual-plan Auto does not expose the Cost, Balance, and Intelligence mode picker described here.
Community reports are warnings, not billing rules
The official pages describe the billing formula. Community threads add operational reports, but they do not establish product-wide behavior.
- On 2026-09-23, a user in r/cursor argued that Composer Fast pricing was too high for many workflows and said Fast cost 3x more than Standard. Cursor's own table is the source for the rates: Composer 2.5 is $0.50 per million input and $2.50 per million output tokens, while Composer 2.5 Fast is $3 and $15. Those are 6x differences for input and output, not a promise about productivity or quality.
- On 2026-09-28, an r/cursor user reported that weekly included usage had reached 100%, on-demand spending still showed $20.42 of a $60 limit, and repeated turns ended with "Bot failed to respond." This is a user's support report, not evidence that every exhausted account stalls in the same way.
- On 2026-10-03, a Cursor forum user reported that
Input (w/ Cache Write)appeared after 2026-09-28 and that the dashboard showed more total tokens. A Cursor staff reply attributed the change to different prompt-cache reporting and said it did not by itself make Auto requests more expensive. That is the explanation in that thread, not an independent billing audit. - On 2026-09-16, a Cursor forum user reported a long Agent chat switching to Grok 4.6 after the Other Models limit was reached. A Cursor staff reply said the model switch was expected, while the reported loss of chat history was not.
The practical rule is short: identify the model that handled the Auto request, read its published rate, then add the Cursor Token Rate only when the route was to a third-party model on Teams or Enterprise.
Sources
- Pricing and plans (read 2026-10-06)
- Models & Pricing (read 2026-10-06)
- Cursor Token Rate (read 2026-10-06)
- Cursor Router (read 2026-10-06)
- Introducing Cursor Router (read 2026-10-06)
- Update on Cursor Router for Pro / Pro+ / Ultra (read 2026-10-06)
- Composer 2 Fast pricing doesn't make sense for most workflows (read 2026-10-06)
- weekly 100%, on-demand has $39 left, hello starts then "Bot failed to respond" (read 2026-10-06)
- Long agent chat lost when "Other Models usage limit" hit (read 2026-10-06)
- Sudden change in token/cache usage after subscription renewal (read 2026-10-06)
Last verified: 2026-10-06.