Cursors stealth bait and switch: From unlimited to unusable - my story

I have stuck with Cursor since mid 2024 because, at its best, it really did feel like having a tireless pair programmer. That trust has been shredded by a year of constant, silent plan rewrites, customer experiments that always end the same way: you pay the same or more, and you get less. Here is the journey so far, straight from my billing history and support emails: * **Launch era:** Pro $20 gave unlimited tab-completes and agents (later). No hidden throttles, no drama. * **First tweak:** Pro suddenly came with 500 “priority” requests, after which you dropped to slow unlimited. Annoying, but livable. * **Next tweak:** Same 500 cap, but once you crossed it you were on usage pricing. Still acceptable because at least it was clear. * **Mystery rate-limit era:** 500 vanished overnight. In its place: an invisible rate-limit system. No counters, no reset clock, just random “try again later”. * **Tightened rate-limit era:** That invisible limit got harsher. Three ordinary chat messages could ice you out for a whole day. * **Hidden Pro + launch:** A $60 plan appeared only if you clicked deep into billing. It promised “unlimited usage, fast requests, 3× the limits of Pro”. Sounded like the original deal, so I upgraded. * **Claude Sonnet “thinking” sting:** The Sonnet 4 “thinking” passes used to be free on Pro +. Now the tooltip says they **do** chew through your allowance—another silent downgrade. * **Today:** Two weeks later I open the IDE and a banner tells me I have used **90 % of my entire monthly allowance**. No metre. No usage log. No explanation of how my supposed unlimited plan is suddenly finite. When I check the plan description, the word *unlimited* has quietly vanished, replaced by “3× more usage than Pro”. At the same time the public website has scrubbed “unlimited” from the $200 Ultra tier. Cursor support docs are unchanged, and there has been zero comms about any of it. Posts calling this out on r/Cursor and their Discord keep disappearing. Two of mine were removed within minutes. The technical hit is just as bad. After every downgrade the model’s stamina drops: it stops earlier, loses context, misses steps, forces me to re-prompt. On Sunday afternoon I ran a light refactor session that would have sailed through the old Pro tier. That single session certainly didn’t burn nine‑tenths of a month on its own; the 90 % banner reflects two weeks of pretty ordinary usage. By this point last year—November and December—I would still have around 300 requests left on the original Pro plan. Either the usage counter is broken or the new ceiling sits miles below what the marketing claims, which makes the whole thing feel extremely fishy. Even the marketing is pure smoke and mirrors. The site now brags about “3× usage” on Pro + and “20× usage” on Ultra—yet 3× or 20× **of what?** They will not reveal the new baseline. If Pro’s ceiling has already been dragged miles below what it was last year, then multiplying it is meaningless. Keeping the base plan muddy lets Cursor price every new tier however they like while users have no hard numbers to verify. It is hard not to see that as an intentional strategy to push upgrades rather than a bug the team forgot to document. This is the VC playbook in fast‑forward: start generous, gather goodwill, then ratchet the limits while pitching new tiers as the fix for problems you created. Spotify, Netflix and YouTube did it over half a decade. Cursor has cycled through five price‑hikes and feature cuts in under twelve months, and it is torching community goodwill at record speed. **Legal**: In the UK and many other jurisdictions, advertising a service as “unlimited” and then quietly imposing hard caps can fall foul of consumer‑protection and misrepresentation rules. If someone pays for a feature and you strip it mid‑contract without clear consent or refund, that opens questions about breach of contract and unfair trading. I’m no solicitor, but I would not be shocked if regulators (or a class‑action firm) eventually take an interest, especially now that money and codebases are on the line. I do not mind paying for a great tool. I *do* mind paying for one thing and having it nerfed mid-cycle with zero notice. I *really* mind being told I am almost out of a resource that the sales page still promised was unlimited a fortnight ago. The silence, the stealth edits, the mod deletions none of it inspires confidence. So, devs of Reddit: * Are you seeing the same sudden 90 % warnings on Pro + or Ultra? * Have your plan descriptions quietly changed too? * At what point do we, as paying users, draw a line and walk? I was happy to be a paying ambassador. Right now I just feel conned. Cursor team, if you are reading this, your product is becoming unusable not because the AI or the product is worse but because your business decisions make it impossible to trust what we are buying or how long we get to keep it. Like, do you want Google or OpenAI to win?? My posts have been removed many times by Cursor Moderators on this sub. Ill be posting it in r/programming too. https://preview.redd.it/cx2olvc1mbbf1.jpg?width=714&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e84c57751a6c9a0eb0fa75be59e2516ffe70532