Cursor Bugbot Drops Seat Fees, Moves to Usage-Based Billing with Configurable Effort Levels
Cursor is removing the $40 per-seat monthly subscription for Bugbot and switching to usage-based billing for Teams and Individuals. The change also unlocks configurable effort levels — you can now tell Bugbot to think harder on complex PRs.
Cursor announced on May 11 that Bugbot is switching to usage-based billing. The flat $40 per seat per month subscription goes away; both Teams and Individual plans will pay based on actual use going forward.
What Changes
Bugbot for Teams will now draw from the team’s on-demand spend rather than a fixed per-seat fee. For Individual plans, Bugbot usage will come out of the included usage quota.
The average Bugbot run costs between $1.00 and $1.50, depending on PR size and complexity.
For existing Bugbot subscribers, the transition kicks in at the next billing renewal after June 5, 2026. Teams on annual plans purchased before the announcement date won’t see the change until May 2027. Existing customers can also opt in early through the Cursor dashboard before the automatic transition.
Effort Levels
The more interesting addition is configurable effort levels for Bugbot reviews. You can now tell Bugbot whether to do a quick pass or a thorough one, and set up custom logic that determines effort dynamically based on PR characteristics.
A deeper-effort run takes longer and costs more per review. The tradeoff is a more complete analysis, closer to what you’d get from a careful manual code review rather than a fast automated scan. For teams that mostly want a quick sanity check on small PRs but full scrutiny on anything touching critical paths, the dynamic option means you can automate that judgment.
Effort-level customization requires being on usage-based billing. Existing seat-subscription customers need to wait for the transition (or opt in early) before this setting becomes available.
Context
Bugbot launched as a paid add-on to Cursor’s existing plans, positioned as an automated code reviewer that runs on every PR. The per-seat pricing model worked fine for small teams but got expensive as headcount grew, since the cost scaled with people rather than with how much the tool actually got used.
Usage-based billing is a reasonable fit for a tool like Bugbot. Teams with slower release cadences or smaller PR volumes pay proportionally less. The effort-level feature also gives teams more control over the cost/quality tradeoff than flat-rate pricing allowed.
Sources: Cursor blog: Updates to Bugbot for Teams and Individuals, Cursor changelog May 11, Releasebot — Cursor updates