If you've used Cursor for any length of time in 2025–2026, you've felt the squeeze. It started in June 2025 with Cursor's shift from flat-rate fast requests to dollar-denominated credit pools. The Pro plan stayed at $20/month but now includes only a $20 credit pool — and a single Composer session running Claude Opus on a large monorepo can burn $5–$10 in one task. I was a happy Cursor Pro subscriber for 12 months. Then my real monthly cost crept to $40, then $60. By January 2026, I quietly migrated to a mix of Claude Code and Windsurf, and my AI coding spend dropped to $20–$35/month flat — with arguably better output. This post covers the 7 mainstream Cursor IDE alternatives I tested in production over 4 months on real client work.…