The X Subscription bundles Cursor with Grok and X Premium. But Claude now costs extra.
The New Stack Paul Sawers ● Covered by 2 sources
X, Grok, and Cursor are now sold as one subscription. Claude and other outside models now cost extra inside Cursor.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Elon Musk’s latest bundle-up move is here: X, Grok, Cursor, and Grok Bot now sit under one plan called The X Subscription. SpaceXAI announced the pricing on X late Monday, and the pitch is simple enough. Pay one bill, get one shared pool of Grok-model usage across eligible products. If you want to keep using rival models in Cursor, though, the bill gets messier fast.
The plan has five tiers, starting at free and running up to $200 a month. The cheapest paid option is $8. That tier adds more Grok and Cursor coding use, plus X perks like a verification checkmark, creator tools, and fewer ads. The $30 Premium tier goes further, adding Grok Bot and more advanced X features, while the $100 Super and $200 Ultra plans scale the included usage much higher.
This is where Cursor users need to pay attention. SpaceXAI says Premium combines benefits that used to cost $90 a month when bought separately through SuperGrok, Cursor Pro, and X Premium+. But some features that used to live in Cursor’s $20 Pro plan, including cloud agents and Origin, now require at least the $30 Premium tier. And because the subscription’s Grok allowance is shared across X, Cursor, Grok, and Grok Bot, heavy use elsewhere can eat into what’s left for coding.
The bigger shift is for third-party models. Under the old Cursor Pro plan, the subscription included $20 worth of usage on models like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, and Google’s Gemini at API prices. Now that included usage is gone. Cursor customers on the new tiers will pay standard API rates from the first request, even if they’re on the $100 or $200 plans. A user who used to spend $20 on Cursor Pro and $20 on Claude, for example, would now be looking at $50 total under Premium.
Existing Cursor subscribers can keep their current plans for now, and SpaceXAI says nobody gets moved automatically today. But a support engineer also said users who don’t migrate will be moved later with advance notice. That leaves Cursor in an awkward place: still technically model-agnostic, but increasingly designed to steer people toward Grok first and everybody else second.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the usual consolidation play dressed up as a convenience feature. Bundle the house model, make the rivals pay extra, and call it choice because the menu still exists. Cursor is drifting from open selection toward platform tax collection, which is very on-brand for the current AI era.
Read more about this at: The New Stack