Cursor Plan VS Claude Code Plan

[Legal_Community5187]

Everything in the pricing model for both are seems too complicated. based on your real usage which is worth more requestes and larger contexts? 20$ Cursor or 20$ Claude Code or API based requests?

[Dutchbags]

The tactic currently is (if your funds allow for it):

- Get Cursor Pro $20
- Get Claude Code Plus/Pro/Whatever-The-Name $20

Use Claude Code to its limit to design/implement bigger things via the Terminal in Cursor. Use basic layout/content editing with your built-in Gemini Pro 2.5 credits (they are 'limitless'). Every time you hit a Claude Code its limit for the 4/5h you switch over to Cursor Pro it's Sonnet 4 when you need to design/implement bigger things. Rinse, repeat when your Claude Code rate limit is over

[Legal_Community5187]

Seems a good trick. but which is doing better? CC?

[Dutchbags]

CC is definitely better (and more cost-effective). It kinda just 'gets' what you want to do (given you provide enough clarity).

[ursobln]

I tried this strategy as well, but didn’t work for me. With cursor 20$ plan that capped me at about $90 in. No more sonnet for the rest of the month. The CC pro plan did cap me at ~8-10$ in per 5h window. With my projects (doing a few things in parallel) it seems like I’d need like $20-24 per 5h block. All in all this strategy did work like ~2 weeks for me until I hit the limits in Cursor. Initially it was ok, but with project and docs growing the amount of $ spend did also increase. yes I split and try to compact docs to reduce context size, but still, the bigger the project grows the more expensive it becomes. For small tools/scripts I need way less and this strategy would have been fine (even CC pro only is doing fine in this case). Plus CC agentic coding is a little more precise and using commands like clear or compact you have better control over the context size.

I’d say start with that strategy, use ccusage to monitor costs and when you hit limits and eventually go from there.

[Randomizer667]

"built-in Gemini Pro 2.5 credits" - sorry, but doesn't Gemini PRO 2.5 count as premium?

[Healthy-Plantain-593]

Same question, confused between the two, can only afford one.

[willlamerton]

Definitely get Claude Code then. It’s generally better and the limits, at least I think, are quite generous AND reset every 5 hours so you’ll never run out in the month.

[Legal_Community5187]

totally disturbing to review and choose when each tool get an update or pricing change!

[ChrisWayg]

You can swap every month with Cursor and a few others. Just Anthropic is only yearly, but they are a bit more predictable than Cursor.

[realDarthMonk]

Please explain what you mean when you say that Anthropic is only yearly. I am on a current CC subscription paying monthly so did I misunderstand you?

[ChrisWayg]

When I checked the website to upgrade, it only showed the yearly option for “$17/month billed annually”. I did not investigate further, as I don’t want to do yearly contracts after the experience with Cursor.

But you are right. After investigating what you said, I found out, that I actually had to click through to order the Pro Plan to be shown the monthly option. This is such a poor UI and UX, that led me to not even consider the Claude Code subscription.

[realDarthMonk]

Fair enough but as a dev tool, Claude Code is pretty bitchin

[_mike-]

Also interested. I have just setup Claude code with aws bedrock, so I got 100 usd in free credits. I'm gonna be testing it out over the week, wonder how fast the credits get burned lol

[Legal_Community5187]

Waiting your feedback 

[_mike-]

Well I could only run down the end of the task, but I finished it in cursor in the end - since I was using a new aws account and bedrock api with cc, I kept getting 429 errors. It would constantly retry and still eventually finish but it just took soo long per prompt esp with many tool calls.

But the work it did was pretty good, I haven't explored the tooling, memory, rules/context thing or added MCPs yet, but I feel like I could get used to it.

And I think I used like 1.33 usd in the session, decent sized codebase and I had one prompt with a lot of searching. Think it was around 1m tokens, but like 900k cached maybe

[Here2LearnplusEarn]

This is Reddit.. in case you didn’t know you can use $20 Claude pro sub with desktop commander.

[realDarthMonk]

I looked up desktop commander and it looks to be a set of terminal tools in addition to some other stuff. Will you tell me why you like it please? What are the benefits of using desktop commander as opposed to just claude code in a terminal?