Quick answer
Cursor Individual is $240/yr. GitHub Copilot Pro is $120/yr. Stack them and you are at $360/yr before inference. Use our free cost calculator to see your real 1-, 2-, and 3-year total versus a free or $39 one-time license.
The subscription tax nobody talks about
Most developers track their AWS bill line by line. Almost nobody tracks their tooling bill. It feels small because each item is billed monthly and the charges show up in different places.
But the math adds up:
- Cursor Individual: $20/month ($240/year)
- GitHub Copilot Pro: $10/month ($120/year)
- Both together: $360/year
Over three years, that is $1,080 for two tools that partially overlap. Add Claude Pro or ChatGPT for general work and you are well past $1,500 before you count API costs. That is real money, and none of it buys you anything you own.
How to use the cost calculator
Go to our free AI IDE cost calculator. Three steps:
- Check the tools you currently pay for from the list (Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Claude, ChatGPT)
- Set your team size (even if you are solo, use 1)
- See your 1-, 2-, and 3-year cumulative cost compared to Bodega One Code
You can also add custom tools with a name and monthly per-seat cost. Useful if you are paying for something not on the default list.
The numbers: 3-year comparison
Using published prices as of early 2026:
| Scenario | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo dev, Cursor Individual only | $240 | $480 | $720 |
| Solo dev, Cursor + Copilot | $360 | $720 | $1,080 |
| Team of 5, Cursor Teams ($40/user/mo) | $2,400 | $4,800 | $7,200 |
| Team of 5, Cursor + Copilot Business ($19/user/mo) | $3,540 | $7,080 | $10,620 |
| Bodega One Code Personal (free, 1 machine) | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Bodega One Code Pro (commercial, up to 2 machines) | $39 | $39 | $39 |
Bodega One Code Personal is free versus Cursor Individual's $240/year. Every month is savings from day one.
Why one-time pricing works for dev tools
Subscription pricing makes sense when there is ongoing compute to pay for: cloud inference, model hosting, team servers. Cursor and Copilot are sending your code to their infrastructure on every keystroke. That costs money, and they pass it on.
Local-first changes the equation. When the model runs on your machine, the provider has no ongoing compute cost per user. The marginal cost of one more user is effectively zero. That is why one-time pricing is sustainable, and why Bodega One Code can offer it while subscription tools cannot.
You bring your own LLM. If you want cloud inference, you use your own API key: Anthropic, OpenAI, whoever. The costs go directly to the provider. No markup, no intermediary, no monthly gate.
The hidden costs the calculator does not include
The calculator shows published per-seat prices. The actual cost is usually higher:
- Admin overhead: Managing seat licenses, onboarding and offboarding team members, dealing with billing disputes. Not free.
- Price increases: Cursor raised prices in 2025. Copilot raised prices. Subscriptions can and do go up mid-year. Your calculator number assumes current prices hold.
- Tool switching: When a tool gets acquired, pivots to enterprise-only, or goes down, you lose work time migrating. Augment Code removed inline completions from non-Enterprise plans on March 31, 2026. Zero notice for individual users.
- Tier creep: You start on Pro, then upgrade to Pro+ or Ultra when you hit usage limits. Cursor Ultra is $200/month. The calculator uses the baseline tier.
Is the calculator conservative or aggressive?
Conservative, if anything. It uses published list prices at a single point in time. It assumes you stay on the same tier you start at. It does not compound price increases. And it counts only tools you select. Most teams have more AI tooling costs than they realize when they sit down to count them.
It also does not include API costs if you use BYOK (bring your own key) features. Those are real costs that belong in your tooling budget.
Next steps
Run the cost calculator with your actual tool stack. Then read our full 3-year AI subscription analysis for a deeper breakdown. When you are ready to compare plans, see Bodega One Code pricing.
Common questions
- How much do Cursor Individual and GitHub Copilot Pro cost together over three years?
- Cursor Individual (renamed from Cursor Pro in May 2026) runs $20 per month and GitHub Copilot Pro runs $10 per month, totaling $360 per year. Over three years, that is $1,080 for two tools with partial overlap. Add Claude Pro or ChatGPT and most teams spend well over $1,500 before counting API costs, with nothing to show for it you own.
- How much faster does Bodega One Code pay for itself compared to Cursor Individual?
- Bodega One Code Personal is free versus Cursor Individual's $20 per month ($240 per year). The savings start immediately. For commercial use, Bodega One Code Pro is $39 one-time, which pays for itself in under two months against Cursor's subscription. Your license stays valid forever with no recurring fees.
- Why can Bodega One Code charge a one-time price instead of a subscription?
- Cursor and Copilot have ongoing infrastructure costs because they route code to their servers on every keystroke. Local-first tools like Bodega One Code run the model on your machine, so the provider has zero ongoing compute cost per user. You bring your own LLM through Ollama or your own API keys, eliminating the intermediary markup.
- What hidden costs does the calculator not include?
- The published cost numbers miss admin overhead for managing licenses, price increases mid-year (Cursor and Copilot both raised prices in 2025), switching costs when tools pivot or get acquired, and tier creep where users upgrade from Pro to Ultra as they hit usage limits. The calculator is conservative by design and uses baseline tier pricing.
Written by the Bodega One team. We build Bodega One Code, the local-first AI IDE, and we write here about local models, AI costs, and what we learn shipping it. More about the team and why we build local-first on the about page.
Related posts
Stay in the loop
Build-in-public updates, model picks, and Copilot/Cursor news as it breaks.
Follow @BodegaOneAI on X →