Cursor splits team usage into two pools and adds a $120 power seat
v3.11 brings Side Chats for parallel agent conversations, Conversation Search and Cloud Agent Hooks. The pricing change underneath: first-party models draw from one usage pool, third-party APIs from another, with Standard seats at $40 and a new Premium seat at $120 for 5x the usage.
Splitting the pools is an admission about margins. Cursor pays cost for Claude, GPT and Gemini calls and pays something closer to nothing for its own Composer models; one blended allowance meant heavy third-party users were subsidised by everyone else. Two pools makes the subsidy explicit and steerable.
The Premium seat is the same recognition from the other end. Agent workloads do not distribute like autocomplete — a minority of developers running long agent sessions consume most of the tokens, and flat per-seat pricing across that distribution is a losing trade. This is the third major coding tool this year to move off all-you-can-eat.
Side Chats are the feature that makes the pricing necessary. Parallel agent conversations mean one developer can have several long-running loops going at once, which is exactly the usage pattern that broke the old model.
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