cursor-cost-optimization

A guide for reducing spending on Cursor, an AI coding editor, using team usage data. It covers how to examine spending and choose less expensive models for different coding tasks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review Cursor Enterprise usage, identify sources of overspending, and recommend model or usage changes.
Why use it?
It helps teams find whether high costs come from particular users, heavy usage, or expensive model choices.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ofershap/cursor-usage/cursor-cost-optimization
Any agent
npx skills add ofershap/cursor-usage --skill cursor-cost-optimization
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ofershap/cursor-usage

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,088 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00036 $0.01088
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00544
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00109

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2ebdedc6c132, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cursor-cost-optimization scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/cursor-cost-optimization/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cursor Cost Optimization

You have access to Cursor Enterprise usage data through the cursor-usage MCP server. This skill teaches you how to identify cost-saving opportunities and recommend actionable changes.

Cost Optimization Framework

Step 1: Understand the Spend Profile

Call get_team_overview to get the baseline, then:

  1. Identify the spend distribution — Is spend concentrated in a few users or spread evenly?

    • If top 10% of users account for >50% of spend → focus on those users
    • If spend is evenly distributed → focus on model selection policies
  2. Identify the cost driver — Is it model choice, volume, or both?

    • Call get_model_usage to see which models dominate
    • Premium models (Opus, GPT-5) at 10-50x the cost of standard models (Sonnet, GPT-4o)
    • A team of 50 where 5 people use Opus can spend more than the other 45 combined

Step 2: Model Selection Optimization

The single highest-impact cost lever is model selection.

Task Type Recommended Model Tier Why
Code completion / tabs Budget (Flash) High volume, low complexity, latency-sensitive
Inline edits (Cmd+K) Standard (Sonnet, GPT-4o) Good balance of quality and cost
Chat conversations Standard Most questions don't need frontier models
Agent mode (complex tasks) Premium (Opus) only when needed Reserve for genuinely complex multi-step work
Code review Standard Pattern matching, not creative generation

Key insight: Most developers default to the "best" model out of habit, not necessity. 80%+ of requests can be handled by standard-tier models with no noticeable quality difference.

Step 3: Spend Limits

Use set_spend_limit to set guardrails:

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 87 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 2ebdedc6c132

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cursor-cost-optimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository ofershap/cursor-usage (8 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 1,088 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.