Scale · founder · 8 min read

The Vibe Coding Pricing Calendar: Every Dated Change We Can Verify

Three price changes for AI coding tools are already on the calendar. One lands today. Here's every one we could confirm from a vendor's own docs.

Published August 31, 2026 ·

pricing budget cursor github copilot gemini models

Most pricing articles tell you what things cost today. That number is wrong within about six weeks, and the article never says so.

This page does something different. It lists price changes that are already scheduled, with the date each one lands and the vendor page we read it on. A dated future event stays true until it happens. A snapshot of current prices starts rotting the moment it publishes.

Three changes are on the calendar right now. One of them lands tonight.

The calendar

Date	Tool	What changes	Sticker price after
Sep 1, 2026	GitHub Copilot	Promotional included credits expire. Business 3,000 → 1,900. Enterprise 7,000 → 3,900.	Unchanged: $19 / $39
Sep 7, 2026	Cursor	Legacy Enterprise Auto flat rate ends. Auto bills at each routed model’s list price.	Unchanged: negotiated
Dec 31, 2026	Gemini 3.7 Flash	Introductory API rate ends. Input and output roughly double.	Unchanged: n/a (API)
Sep 1, 2026	Claude Sonnet 5	Cancelled Aug 10. The $2/$10 introductory rate is now permanent.	Unchanged: $2 / $10

Notice the last column. In every single row, the advertised price is identical before and after. That is not a coincidence, and it is the whole reason this page exists.

Tonight: the Copilot cushion expires

When GitHub moved Copilot to usage-based billing on June 1, existing Business and Enterprise customers got three months of elevated included credits. GitHub’s billing docs define that window as “June 1 – September 1, 2026.” It closes tonight.

Business seats drop from 3,000 included credits to 1,900. Enterprise drops from 7,000 to 3,900. Credits are worth exactly $0.01 each, so that’s $11 and $31 per seat of included usage disappearing — a 37% and 44% cut. Seat prices don’t move.

Two details make this worse than the numbers suggest. Credits are pooled at the billing-entity level, so no individual developer gets a warning that the team is running dry. And additional usage is on by default — when the pool empties, consumption doesn’t stop, it bills to the org at published rates with no automatic fallback to a cheaper model. A 20-seat Business org with flat usage goes from $380 to roughly $600 a month. We covered the arithmetic in your Copilot bill goes up on Tuesday.

What to do before your next billing cycle closes: set a budget in your org’s billing settings, and decide deliberately whether additional usage should stay enabled. The default answer is yes, and nobody chose it.

September 7: Cursor’s last flat rate

Cursor moved individual and Teams plans to routed-model pricing on August 24. Enterprise customers on legacy Auto arrangements got a two-week extension. Cursor’s own docs are unambiguous: “Until September 7, 2026, Enterprise Auto pricing is set per million tokens, regardless of which model is used.”

That legacy rate is $1.25 input / $6 output per million tokens, flat, whatever model Auto picks. After the 7th, Auto bills at the list price of whatever it routed to — from Composer 2.5 at $0.50/$2.50 up to Claude Fable 5 at $10/$50. That is a twenty-fold spread hiding behind one setting.

Teams and Enterprise also pay a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens on top of the model’s API price, for any third-party model. Cursor’s own Grok and Composer models are exempt — so the routing decision now has two cost levers, and the cheaper one points at Cursor’s own inference.

If you’re on a negotiated Enterprise order form, check it: Cursor’s docs say the public default applies “unless a negotiated order form says otherwise.” That’s a question for your account rep this week, not next month.

December 31: Gemini Flash doubles

Gemini 3.7 Flash launched August 13 at an introductory rate. Google’s published plan is for that rate to end on December 31, 2026, after which input and output roughly double.

One caveat. Cursor’s model table — which we read directly — shows Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75 input / $3.50 output. Secondary reporting on Google’s own intro rate consistently says $0.75 / $3.75, doubling to $1.50 / $7.50. We could not reach Google’s pricing page to confirm the output figure ourselves, so treat that exact number as reported rather than verified. The date and the direction are consistent across every source we checked.

Why a model price belongs on a tool-pricing calendar: if your builder routes to Flash for cheap work — and several do — a doubling at the model layer reaches your bill without anyone announcing a price rise. See which model powers your vibe coding tool.

The one that got cancelled

On July 2 we told readers that Claude Sonnet 5’s introductory $2/$10 rate would rise to $3/$15 on September 1. Anthropic cancelled that on August 10 and made the intro rate permanent. We corrected the original guide yesterday.

It belongs on this calendar as a strike-through rather than a deletion, for two reasons. It’s the only move all year that went in the customer’s favour. And it’s a reminder that scheduled changes get cancelled, which is exactly why a calendar needs a maintenance date on it.

What we could not put a date on

Honest gaps, so you know what this page isn’t covering:

• Lovable, Replit, Bolt and Base44 publish no forward-dated pricing changes at all. Their prices move, sometimes substantially, but they arrive as a live pricing page rather than an announcement with a date. We check these monthly; there is nothing scheduled we can point at.
• OpenAI and Midjourney return 403 to automated reads of their pricing pages. Any figure you see quoted for either is third-party unless the writer says otherwise.
• Regional pricing is now a real fork, not a currency conversion. Cursor launched a Start plan at ₹649/month available only to developers in India, which covers Cursor’s own models but excludes the third-party model pool, Auto, Bugbot and on-demand usage entirely. That’s a different product, not a discount. If you’re outside the US, check the vendor’s page from your own connection.

How to actually use this

Three habits, and they’re all about the allowance rather than the price.

Diary the dates. Put September 7 and December 31 in a calendar with a reminder to check your usage dashboard, not your invoice. The invoice arrives a month late.

Find your overage default before you need it. For each tool your team pays for, answer one question: when the included usage runs out, does it stop, throttle, or bill? Copilot bills. Cursor bills. Notion pauses. You want to know which one you’re on before the pool empties, not after.

Stop comparing seat prices. A $19 seat with 1,900 pooled credits and overage on by default is not cheaper than a $39 seat with a hard stop. The seat price has become the least informative number on the pricing page, and every change on this calendar is proof.

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Maintained page. Last verified August 31, 2026. We re-check each vendor’s pricing docs when a listed date passes and add new dated changes as they’re announced. If a date on this page has passed and the row is still here, the check is overdue — tell us.

Sources read directly: Cursor — Models & Pricing, GitHub Docs — usage-based billing for organizations and enterprises, Anthropic — Claude Platform pricing.