Your head of engineering wants to roll out an AI coding assistant to the whole team. Someone needs to give finance a budget number. You open the pricing pages for Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon Q. The seat prices look straightforward — $20, $19, $19 a month. They're not.
There are usage caps that kick in after a few hundred fast requests. Enterprise minimums that double the per-seat price. Billing surprises that don't show up until month two. And in most cases, none of these tools give you a clear view of what individual developers are actually consuming.
Here's what the pricing pages don't tell you.
The Three Tools
Cursor is a standalone IDE built around AI — tab completion, multi-file edits, and in-editor chat powered by Claude and GPT-4o. It has the most AI-native product experience of the three but requires developers to switch from their existing editor.
GitHub Copilot is an extension for VS Code, JetBrains, and other editors. It's powered by OpenAI models and integrates directly with GitHub workflows — pull request summaries, code reviews, and repository context. It's the default choice for GitHub-native teams.
Amazon Q Developer (formerly CodeWhisperer) integrates with VS Code, JetBrains, and the AWS Console. It's built for AWS-heavy teams — it understands AWS APIs, suggests IAM policies, and helps with CloudFormation. Less compelling outside the AWS ecosystem.
What Each Seat Price Actually Covers
Cursor
Hobby — Free. 2,000 completions and 50 slow premium requests per month. Not practical for daily development work.
Pro — $20/seat/month. 500 fast premium requests per month (powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o). After 500, the tool falls back to a slower model. Unlimited slow requests. No team management features. No usage analytics.
Business — $40/seat/month. Unlimited fast requests (fair use policy applies). Team admin dashboard with per-developer usage visibility. SSO. Privacy mode (code not used for training). This is the minimum tier for any team that wants cost visibility or admin controls.
The key detail: Cursor Pro has no usage dashboard. You pay $20/seat and have no way to see which developers are hitting limits, which aren't, or whether the tool is actually being used. Business doubles the price but adds the visibility that makes it manageable at scale.
GitHub Copilot
Individual — $10/seat/month or $100/year. Covers one developer. Explicitly prohibited for business use under the terms of service — you cannot roll this out to a company team on Individual plans.
Business — $19/seat/month. Team management, usage policies, audit logs, IP indemnification. This is the minimum tier for any company deployment.
Enterprise — $39/seat/month. Adds Copilot in GitHub.com (PR summaries, code search, documentation chat), custom knowledge bases (index your private repositories for context), and fine-tuned models. Relevant for larger engineering organisations wanting deeper GitHub integration.
The practical starting point for any company is Copilot Business at $19/seat. Individual is not an option for team rollout.
Amazon Q Developer
Free tier — 50 inline code suggestions per day, 5 chat interactions per month, 5 security scans per month. Enough to evaluate the tool, not enough for daily use.
Pro — $19/seat/month. Unlimited code suggestions, chat interactions, and security scans. Agent capabilities for software development tasks. AWS Marketplace billing option.
Amazon Q has a genuine free tier worth evaluating before you commit — unlike Cursor and Copilot, which both require payment for meaningful usage.
What the Headline Price Misses
The Cursor usage cap problem
Cursor Pro's 500 fast requests per month sounds generous until you work with it daily. A developer doing active feature work — writing code, asking questions, refactoring — can hit 500 requests in two to three weeks. The remaining days of the month use the slower model.
Heavy Cursor users on Pro plans regularly report hitting limits mid-month. The experience degrades noticeably. Business ($40/seat) removes the cap. The choice is: pay $20 and accept degraded performance for heavy users, or pay $40 and get a consistent experience with visibility.
The Copilot Business-to-Enterprise jump
GitHub Copilot Business at $19/seat is well-priced. Enterprise at $39/seat is a 2x jump. The Enterprise features — Copilot in GitHub.com, knowledge bases — are valuable for larger teams but are often overkill for engineering teams primarily using the editor extension. Evaluate carefully before upgrading; many teams on Enterprise aren't using the features that justify the premium.
The Amazon Q ecosystem dependency
Amazon Q Pro is competitively priced at $19/seat. The model quality for general coding tasks is reasonable. But its strongest features are AWS-specific: understanding AWS service APIs, generating Infrastructure as Code, flagging AWS security misconfigurations. For teams not deeply invested in AWS, these features don't justify switching away from Copilot or Cursor.
Real Cost Scenarios
Costs below use the most practical tier for each team size.
Cursor
| Team Size | Pro ($20/seat) | Business ($40/seat) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 engineers | $200/month | $400/month |
| 25 engineers | $500/month | $1,000/month |
| 50 engineers | $1,000/month | $2,000/month |
| 100 engineers | $2,000/month | $4,000/month |
At 50 engineers, the choice between Pro and Business is a $12,000/year decision — and the only thing Business adds is admin visibility and no usage cap.
GitHub Copilot
| Team Size | Business ($19/seat) | Enterprise ($39/seat) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 engineers | $190/month | $390/month |
| 25 engineers | $475/month | $975/month |
| 50 engineers | $950/month | $1,950/month |
| 100 engineers | $1,900/month | $3,900/month |
Amazon Q Developer
| Team Size | Pro ($19/seat) |
|---|---|
| 10 engineers | $190/month |
| 25 engineers | $475/month |
| 50 engineers | $950/month |
| 100 engineers | $1,900/month |
Admin Visibility: Which Tool Can You Actually Budget?
This is where the tools differ most meaningfully for finance and engineering leadership.
Cursor Business provides a team usage dashboard showing per-developer request consumption. You can see who is using the tool heavily, who isn't using it at all, and whether individuals are hitting limits. This is the only Cursor tier with any usage analytics.
GitHub Copilot Business provides aggregate metrics — completions shown, completions accepted, active users. You can see overall adoption rates and usage trends. There is no per-developer cost breakdown, but the fixed per-seat model means there are no billing surprises — you pay for seats regardless of how much each developer uses the tool.
Amazon Q Developer Pro billing appears in AWS Cost Explorer alongside the rest of your AWS spend. Usage metrics (suggestions accepted, lines of code suggested) are available in CloudWatch. For AWS-native teams already using Cost Explorer for cloud billing, Q integrates cleanly into existing reporting.
Which Tool for Which Team?
Choose Cursor if developer experience is the priority and you're willing to pay for it. The product is genuinely better for complex, multi-file AI-assisted development. Use Business (not Pro) for any team larger than five people — the usage visibility is worth the premium. Requires developers to adopt a new IDE.
Choose GitHub Copilot Business if your team lives in GitHub and wants minimal disruption. Works in existing editors, integrates with pull requests and code review, and the Business tier is the most straightforward to budget (fixed seat cost, no usage surprises). The right default for most teams.
Choose Amazon Q Developer if you're AWS-heavy and want coding assistance that understands your infrastructure. The free tier is genuinely useful for evaluation. Pro is competitively priced. Outside of the AWS ecosystem, it's harder to justify over Copilot or Cursor.
When You're Running More Than One
Most organisations end up with a mix. Some developers prefer Cursor. Some teams default to Copilot because of GitHub integration. Some AWS-focused engineers find Q useful for infrastructure work. When three tools are running simultaneously, the combined cost is invisible unless you're tracking it explicitly.
Connect Cursor and GitHub to StackSpend to track per-developer AI tool spend across providers in one place — alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and cloud AI costs.