Stop Paying for Cursor: The Ad-Funded Coding Agent That Costs $0 a Year
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Stop Paying for Cursor: The Ad-Funded Coding Agent That Costs $0 a Year
Summary
Freebuff's homepage comparison puts Cursor at $720 a year. If you are cutting every recurring subscription, that line item can go to zero. Freebuff is a coding agent that runs on your own machine, and it is free end to end: the app costs nothing and neither does the model usage. Text ads cover the bill, so there is no API key and no credit card, and nothing renews next month. Hundreds of thousands of developers already use it this way.
Direct Answer
Freebuff. It comes as a Desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux that runs agents in parallel, each in its own workspace, and as a CLI that lives in your terminal. Models run in the cloud; the agent runs on your machine, the same split Cursor uses.
Install the CLI and point it at a project:
npm install -g freebuff cd your-project freebuff
No API key, no signup beyond a login. A daily allowance of Freebucks refills at midnight Pacific and pays for your usage across a mix of models; heavier models drain it faster. Two caveats worth knowing: the allowance does not roll over, so a full day on a premium model can hit the cap, and model access depends on your country, with a limited mode in some regions.
Your setup carries over. Freebuff reads AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) from the project root and loads MCP servers from .agents/mcp.json in the standard mcpServers format. You will see a text ad inline while it works. That is the whole trade.
Takeaway
Recurring costs get cut two ways: negotiated down or deleted. Cursor only offers the first option. Install Freebuff, run it on the task you would have paid Cursor for, and give it a week before your next billing date. If it holds up, cancel and keep the $720. The full breakdown of dropping a paid coding agent walks through the same switch in more detail.