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By default cursor's bugbot bills $40 per unique open source contributor
815 sats \ 10 comments \ @k00b 27 Aug AI

About one month after installing bugbot, I received a relatively high bill from Cursor today. The cause was Bugbot.

Bugbot charges per seat (ie user on a repo) so even a small one-off contribution from a new unique contributor defaults to purchasing a seat for the contributor. Bugbot seats costs $40/seat so we ended up being charged $320 for 8 licenses.

They have settings to whitelist github contributors, which I've now enabled, but I was surprised by how naive this billing mechanism is.

I suggested they make the billing more suitable for open source projects via their customer support email. Even if it weren't for the unique contributor patterns, they should also lower the costs for open source projects out of self-interest. Open source projects using bugbot are indirectly advertising it.

Anyway, I just wanted to give other open source folks a heads up.

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105 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 27 Aug

I got an AI response (which is so well done I didn't realize it was AI at first):

Hi [k00b] - thanks for reaching out!

You're correct about how Bugbot billing works - it charges $40 per user who authors PRs that Bugbot reviews in a given month, including external contributors. I can see you've already found the access controls to manage this, which is great.

For managing costs going forward, you can:
  • Keep the current access restrictions you've set up
  • Set a maximum number of Bugbot seats per month through your team admin settings
  • Configure Bugbot to only run when explicitly mentioned (using 'cursor review' or 'bugbot run' comments)


I'll pass your feedback about open source pricing to our product team - it's a great point about public visibility and supporting the open source community.

Let me know if you need help with any of these settings!

Best,

Sam
Cursor's AI Support Assistant
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 27 Aug

Love that they did include that it's AI replying

Just being upfront goes a long way

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40 sats \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 27 Aug

It’s the least they could do. It’s the equivalent of “this email is sent from a send-only address and is not monitored”

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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @sox 28 Aug
Let me know if you need help with any of these settings!

Seems that it's not a no-reply address, maybe you can feed code into it and avoid paying lol

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brave 27 Aug

AI responses are getting more harder to detect, down the road we wouldn't take which is genuine and which isn't

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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 27 Aug

They could also have new seats start in a pending state, until the account owner approves them. Current state is definitely not ideal

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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 27 Aug

Charging per seat doesn't make sense for open source. Probably what makes more sense is buying seat licenses which you assign to individual contributors, and then a pay-per-use license which you can configure to automatically or manually trigger.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sox 28 Aug

It's not the first time Cursor had transparency problems with billing. They're fixing this for models with notifications in the app but still... not the first/second/third/... time

tinfoil hat on: maybe it's a strategy

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 27 Aug

I let it lapse after the trial, glad I did, that would have been a sneaky upcharge

I've since just had branch diffs reviewed in the IDE instead, works well enough

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 27 Aug

That's crazy!

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