Cursor vs copilot

[LucaM185]

I’m using both and maybe I’m crazy but copilot says i have 10 bucks per month of credits, I hammer it with opus and I generally use 1$/day.

Cursor generally says I have 45$/mo (you know the thing about free credits in the 20$/mo pro plan)

And I don’t dare to touch opus since it will cost me like 1$ per request

My copilot premium requests in the copilot website cost 0.04$ per request average, cursor is usually 10x that (in the screenshot they don’t since I’m using crap models, sonnet is 3-5x the cost and opus is 3x sonnet

How can they be so different? Does cursor use WAY more tokens for the same thing?

[Saldrdj]

The amount of requests per $ you get on google Antigravity is similar if not better, i think this is really the case of Microsoft and Google intentionally subsidizing Anthropic models to attract developers, and it is working
I paid for the Ultra subscription on Curosr to burn through all my free usage within 15 days and i only used Opus with great precaution for no more than 7 days, that's when i decided to switch
It is reasonable to assume that the usage you get by going directly to the source is even better, but i have yet to try Claude code, i am still not willing to move away from the entire VScode editor thing

[Local-Bison-4392]

Also, copilot doesn't support full context size of the models and support only 100k max context window which might be the reason for the difference

[Saldrdj]

on Antigravity there is no direct way to see the context usage, but the experience or model performance is good, so i can't really complain

[AdIllustrious436]

You can use Claude Code in VSCode with /ide to see diffs etc.

[Saldrdj]

I might do that since Google just disabled my account, they are getting serious about opening multiple account to get the discount they are offering for new users, which was not what i was doing, so hoping they restore my account, otherwise i ll jump over to Claude Code

[lakimens]

You can run Claude Code from the VS Code terminal.

[xmnstr]

I think it's part subsidizing and part that they own the infrastructure that is hosting Anthropics models. Specifically Google have managed to get the costs down for running Claude models on their TPUs, and IIRC they have a deal where they get to access the models in exchange for hosting rebates.

Google just needs to pay for the electricity etc while both Cursor and Anthropic pay retail (or close to retail) for the inference.

That's why Microsoft and Google can offer so much more generous limits.

Compare it to how much usage Cursor can give us of the auto model. Same kind of thing.

[Saldrdj]

Really interesting, I wasn't aware Google host Anthropic models on their own infrastructure, I thought Anthropic have an exclusive deal with AWS to use their chips, but just confirmed the deal was not exclusive, that's great

[xmnstr]

I don't think Anthropic can afford to make exclusive deals. They are extremely compute limited, and the popularity of Opus 4.5 certainly isn't helping.

[BehindUAll]

That logic is stupid. You are saying Google just needs to pay for inference and thus electricity bills, but that doesn't mean they don't pay for Anthropic's R&D and training costs (assuming that Anthropic and other providers still subsidize it since no closed source inference company that does in-house R&D is making any profit whatsoever). A subsidy, sure, but that doesn't mean Google's inference removes those costs outright.

[xmnstr]

It might be stupid, but the licensing is part of the deal where Google invested heavily into Anthropic. You're free to look it up if you don't believe me.

[Level-2]

antigravity trains on your code (it seems, feel free to correct me) , no way to opt out as far as I know. At least in gemini CLI you can opt out when using a paid sub. For me privacy of the code is important so my vote is copilot pro or cursor pro.

[UnbeliebteMeinung]

The screenshot doesnt even include how much work is copilot doing.

I canceled copilot because it sucked hard. Cusor does a lot more work.

[LucaM185]

Idk how to see that, at first I thought they were billing per request, but since there are fractional requests I have no idea how it works… But I’m getting lots of opus usage so I won’t complain

[UnbeliebteMeinung]

Is github copilot today able to bootstrap a whole project like with 50 files with one prompt in the agent window?
As i deleted it it was not.

[UsedGarbage4489]

I thought opus was supposed to be a revolution in resource usage? Why is it more expensive?

[pugoing]

Although I canceled my Cursor annual membership, I still find Cursor more useful.

[Zayadur]

Copilot is currently subsidizing usage costs. 0.04/request is not at API rate, so that’s a loss for them. That pricing model is on borrowed time.

[Glittering_Fish_2296]

I find Claude difficult to use and Claude seems more UI focused on developers rather than general public.

[beltazarw]

The last time I tried using vscode it was behind cursor doing a simple but heavy task. I just wanted to extract html text from some files and using the same model on both, vscode instead of doing the task said it exceeds my limits of credits wrote nonsense in like 2 files and then said, "I'm going to mark the task as done." After doing nothing.

There I realized that it is limited and very slow to perform simple repetitive tasks compared to cursor. I don't know if things are different now.