Elon Musk’s mission to unify his sprawling tech empire continues apace, with the news that X, Grok, and Cursor are being bundled together as a single plan dubbed The X Subscription.
Taking to X late on Monday, SpaceXAI announced the new pricing structure. It has five tiers, from free up to $200 per month, with the cheapest paid option costing $8. Paid tiers share a single pool of Grok-model usage across eligible products, and existing Cursor subscribers can keep their current plans — for now, at least.
However, arguably the bigger news for developers is the change to how Cursor charges for AI models. While the new subscriptions offer more included coding usage with Grok, customers who prefer competing models from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI will face additional charges.
Musk’s businesses come together
To rewind a little, Musk’s efforts to consolidate his businesses have been several years in the making. He acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, rebranding the social network as X the following July. That same month, he founded xAI, an OpenAI rival that unveiled its Grok chatbot later that year before making it available directly through X. In March 2025, the corporate structure changed again when xAI formally acquired X.
The consolidation continued back in February, when SpaceX acquired xAI, bringing Grok and X into the rocket company’s portfolio. Meanwhile, SpaceX agreed to buy AI coding company Cursor in a deal reportedly valued at $60 billion, which closed in mid-August. That same month, SpaceX launched Grok Bot, an autonomous AI assistant that can carry out tasks across third-party apps.
Some of these products were already bundled. X Premium has long included Grok, for example, and Cursor plans have included Grok Bot since August. But the X Subscription is the first plan to cover Cursor, Grok, Grok Bot, and X Premium together, with a single shared usage pool.
As an aside, SpaceXAI is in the midst of changing its name to SpaceXSI after Musk confirmed in early October that he would be following President Trump’s directive to use “super intelligence” (SI) in place of artificial intelligence (AI) — a move that is already reflected in its social media branding.
We've unified plans across Grok, Cursor, and X Premium.
— SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) October 12, 2026
Introducing The X Subscription. pic.twitter.com/SvkrVvBa0p
What the X Subscription means for Cursor users
The five tiers differ in the amount of AI usage they include, as well as which features customers can access. The free option offers limited use of Grok and Cursor’s coding agents, while the $8 Plus plan increases those allowances and adds X benefits, including a verification checkmark, creator tools, and fewer advertisements.
The $30 Premium tier is where the offering expands more substantially, adding access to Grok Bot, more advanced X features, and four times the AI usage included with Plus. The $100 Super plan increases that allowance to 15 times the Plus allocation, while the $200 Ultra tier raises it to 50 times. SpaceXAI says Premium combines benefits that previously cost $90 per month when purchased separately through SuperGrok, Cursor Pro, and X Premium+.
It’s also worth noting here that previously, its $20 Pro plan included cloud agents and Origin, the company’s GitHub alternative launched in August. Under The X Subscription, both features require at least the $30 Premium tier, meaning developers switching from the old Pro plan would have to pay an additional $10 per month to retain access to them.
For developers more broadly, there’s a pretty important distinction in how these various allowances work. Subscriptions come with a weekly allocation for using Grok models, which customers can draw on across Cursor, the Grok apps, and X. Grok Bot also consumes that allowance on eligible plans. So someone using Grok heavily for other activities could find themselves with less included usage available for coding. SpaceXAI, though, claims the new plans provide at least twice as much coding usage with its own models as comparable older Cursor subscriptions.
Third-party models now cost extra on Cursor
The economics of all this change considerably for developers who prefer to use third-party models from the frontier labs.
Previously, Cursor’s $20-per-month Pro plan included $20 worth of usage on third-party models such as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini, calculated at their respective API prices. Cursor also provided additional usage beyond that allowance. Its $60 Pro+ and $200 Ultra plans included $70 and $400 worth of API-priced model usage respectively, before accounting for any additional allowances.
“The economics of all this change considerably for developers who prefer to use third-party models from the frontier labs.”
Under The X Subscription, access to third-party models starts with the $30 Premium tier, but the subscription fee no longer covers any of their usage. Instead, developers are charged at the models’ standard API rates from their very first request, with payments handled through prepaid credits. This applies even to customers paying $100 or $200 per month for the higher tiers.
To put that into perspective, a developer who previously paid $20 for Cursor Pro and consumed $20 worth of Claude usage could have had their entire bill covered by their subscription. Under the new Premium plan, that same usage would bring their monthly spending to $50 — comprising the $30 subscription and $20 in additional model charges.
There are changes for businesses, too. Team subscriptions now start at $30 per user per month, down from the previous $40 entry-level Cursor Teams plan, with higher tiers available at $100 and $200. The company claims that its revised team offering provides three times more coding usage than its predecessor, alongside administrative features such as single sign-on, centralized billing and usage analytics.
Existing Cursor subscribers can continue with their current plans and included third-party model allowances for now. However, the announcement sparked a flurry of questions on Cursor’s community forum, particularly from existing Pro, Pro+ and Ultra subscribers trying to understand how the new plans compare with their current subscriptions. Some questioned whether switching would leave them paying more for the same usage, while others wanted to know whether they could simply stick with their existing plans indefinitely.
Responding to these concerns on Tuesday, Colin Mueller, a technical support engineer who joined SpaceXAI from Cursor in August, indicates that existing customers could stay put for the time being, though a mandatory transition may eventually be on the cards.
“Users who don’t choose to migrate will, sometime in the future, be migrated with advance notice.”
“Nothing happens to your Pro plan automatically,” Mueller writes. “You can keep it at the same price with the same features for now. Users who don’t choose to migrate will, sometime in the future, be migrated with advance notice.”
That would suggest a move to the new subscriptions is inevitable. But in a separate response to another user discussing the existing Ultra plan, Mueller is more cautious about what the company may or may not do.
“On how long the current plan lasts: it isn’t going away today, and there’s no timeline for moving remaining customers,” Mueller adds. “If that changes, you’ll get advance notice first.”
However, some developers are questioning what the changes mean for Cursor’s longstanding appeal as a platform that lets users choose between different AI models. One self-described longtime Ultra subscriber, posting under the username coco_max, argues that the new pricing risks alienating the developers who helped establish Cursor’s reputation, particularly those who rely heavily on Claude and GPT.
“Cursor earned its place next to Codex and Claude Code not because of its own model, but because it was ‘one editor where you can use the best models,’” the user writes. “A lot of us have all three installed, and Cursor is the one that stays open all day, precisely because it isn’t locked to any single vendor. The new plans change that.”
“Cursor earned its place next to Codex and Claude Code not because of its own model, but because it was ‘one editor where you can use the best models.’”
A battle over AI models and subscriptions
SpaceXAI’s pricing shake-up comes as Cursor is already losing access to one of its most popular model providers. In August, OpenAI announced plans to withdraw direct access to its models through Cursor, with a proposed cutoff date of November 12, citing concerns about Elon Musk’s track record on compliance with its terms of service.
Anthropic, for its part, pledged to continue supporting Claude in Cursor, despite competing directly with Grok. The relationship is complicated further by Anthropic’s multibillion-dollar agreement to purchase computing capacity from SpaceX.
There’s also a certain irony in the new pricing structure. Just last week, Musk confirmed that Grok Bot would use whichever AI model was best suited to a particular task, explicitly naming Anthropic’s Claude among the options. Yet developers who want to use Claude directly through Cursor now face additional charges under the new subscriptions.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is pursuing its own subscription strategy. At its DevDay conference in September, the company expanded its Sign in with ChatGPT offering, allowing paying subscribers to use their existing AI allowances inside third-party developer tools such as Devin, Amp and Warp. The move essentially gives OpenAI another way to keep developers using its models across competing products, without requiring separate API payments for eligible usage.
Ultimately, the new X Subscription raises questions about Cursor’s future as a model-agnostic coding platform. SpaceX clearly wants to encourage greater adoption of Grok, and its new pricing provides a financial incentive to do so. But with developers accustomed to choosing between Claude, GPT and other models, it remains to be seen whether the new offering will persuade them to embrace Grok — or prompt some to look elsewhere.
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