AI IDE cost comparison: how much are you really paying?

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 Pro: $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:

1. Check the tools you currently pay for from the list (Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Claude, ChatGPT)
2. Set your team size (even if you are solo, use 1)
3. See your 1-, 2-, and 3-year cumulative cost compared to Bodega One

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:

The breakeven on Bodega One Personal versus Cursor Pro alone is about 4 months. After that, every month is savings.

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 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 pricing.