What happened
Cursor quietly changed what its Usage page shows. Until late July, the page displayed a running dollar total so you could watch your spend at a glance. Now, on self-serve plans, including individual plans and Teams, that number is a token count instead, the raw unit of AI usage Cursor’s models consume, not a dollar figure.
Several users flagged the switch on Cursor’s community forum, saying they used the dollar view daily to keep tabs on spending and couldn’t find a way to bring it back. A Cursor team member, Kevin Neilson, confirmed there’s no setting to revert it, because the change is intentional.
Neilson initially explained that included usage would show tokens marked “Included,” while on-demand usage would retain a Cost column. Later that evening, he corrected the scope: the Usage page was token-based for self-serve plans, including Teams. Its Spend metric and Cost column had been removed, and the Usage CSV no longer contained dollar costs.
He said the change also affected historical records because it was applied when usage records were read. Enterprise plans kept dollar-based reporting. Teams admins could still access spending data and cost fields through Cursor’s supported Admin API.
Cursor said dollar estimates for included usage had confused users because those estimates could exceed their subscription price. That explains the company’s design choice, but aggregate billing totals do not replace per-request or per-model cost comparisons.
Why it matters
If you’re on an individual Cursor plan and used the Usage page as your daily spend check, that habit no longer works. Token counts alone do not show the dollar cost of individual requests or models. The Spending page still provides an on-demand total for the billing cycle.
The risk isn’t that your bill changes. It’s that the page you were watching stops telling you what you think it’s telling you, and you don’t find out until the bill arrives.
Who should care
This matters most if you’re a solo developer or freelancer on a Pro, Pro+, or Ultra plan who tracks spend closely, especially if you use Cursor heavily enough to regularly cross into on-demand, billable usage. It matters less if you’re comfortably within your plan’s included allowance every month and never see on-demand charges, or if you’re on an Enterprise plan with dollar-based reporting. Teams admins should check their separate spending controls and Admin API access.
What builders should do next
Use the Spending page for the billable total, and distinguish that total from detailed usage reporting:
Go to Dashboard > Spending to see your “On-Demand Spending” figure for the current billing cycle. Cursor’s own description of this number: it’s “the number matching what you will be billed.” That’s the closest thing to a live bill total that individual plans now show.
The Usage CSV remains useful for token-level analysis, but Neilson’s later clarification says it no longer provides dollar costs for self-serve plans. Do not treat missing or zero cost fields as free usage. Teams admins can use the supported Admin API for spending data; Neilson said the self-serve dashboard no longer offered a per-model dollar breakdown.
If you rely on Cursor for paid client work or run it against a personal budget you don’t want to blow past, check Dashboard > Spending at least weekly instead of glancing at the Usage page out of habit. The page still updates constantly. It just isn’t telling you what it used to.
End of article