Are you overpaying for Cursor, Copilot & Claude Code?

Most solo devs pay $80–200/mo for AI coding tools and use a fraction of it. This 5-minute audit shows you what each one actually costs for the way you work — and the $15–35/mo stack that does about 90% of the job.

Prices hand-verified against official pages, as of 2026-06-10 (US). No rankings — the right answer depends on how you code.

Step 1 — the 30-second overpay check

Open your AI tool's usage dashboard, read last month's actual usage (tokens / requests / hours), and compare it to your flat monthly plan. If a pay-as-you-go (metered) estimate would have cost less than your subscription, you're buying capacity you didn't use.

Step 2 — flat vs metered (the real decision)

• Flat plans (Cursor Pro $20, Claude Max $100–200) are insurance: great if you code daily, wasteful in quiet weeks.
• Metered / API (Claude Code via API, OpenRouter) bills what you use: cheaper for light/irregular use — just set a hard spend cap so an agent can't loop and burn tokens.

Step 3 — the quietly cheaper stack

≈ $15–35/mo instead of $120+ for light-to-moderate use. The frontier models still win the single hardest reasoning step — keep one, on metered.

Verdict by use case

• Only want autocomplete? GitHub Copilot ($10). Cancel the rest.
• Live in multi-file edits / refactors? Cursor Pro ($20) earns it. Drop the second agent.
• Run long agentic tasks weekly? Claude Code Max ($100) — only if your metered estimate would exceed it. Check first.
• Code a few hours a week? Copilot ($10) + Cline/Continue on DeepSeek/Qwen (~$5–25). This is the overpaying-killer.

Verified prices (2026-06-10)

Full index of 38 AI tool plans → thestackletter.com/ai-tool-prices