Everyone quotes the sticker price. Nobody quotes the pricing model — and the model is what decides your real bill. I run a small online store selling 1-year plans for these exact tools, so I watch official-vs-street pricing every day. Here's what the pricing pages don't tell you.
Cursor — $20/month Pro, but the meter is requests. The flat $20 is honest for moderate use: an editor with an agent inside your own repo, nothing tied to a platform. The catch: heavy agent use pushes people toward the $60 and $200 tiers, and third-party models bill by usage on top. If you read code and work in your own repo daily, it's the most predictable bill here. If you barely touch the agent, the free Hobby tier is enough — don't pay for capacity you'll never use.
Replit — $20/month Core ($18 billed annually), but the meter is effort. Replit prices by "effort" — you can't know what a request costs until it runs. The free Starter tier is genuinely usable (daily Agent credits, a database, one published project), but the usage page that converts credits into dollars sits behind the paid plan, and the free tier hides dollar figures entirely. Core suits steady daily use; for occasional heavy sprints, the bill is hard to predict. Set a spending cap yourself — it won't do it for you.
Lovable — $25/month Pro, but the meter is credits. 100 credits a month, top-ups at $15 per 50. Lovable publishes the credit count and the credit price, so the arithmetic is transparent — the surprise is behavioral: fix loops. Builders consistently report agents burning credits re-reading the codebase on every change. Lovable is the fastest path from a written brief to a hosted app, but budget for iteration, not just the build.
n8n — €20/month Starter (annual), but the meter is executions. 2,500 executions a month sounds generous until a polling trigger fires every minute. That's 43,000+ executions a month from one workflow checking an empty inbox. Self-hosting the Community Edition is free software-wise plus ~€5/month for a VPS — the real cost is the afternoon you lose when something breaks at 2am.
The framework I give every buyer — three questions before you pay:
- How many days a week will you actually use it? Under 3 — stay on the free tier.
- Does the meter match your usage pattern? Bursty work hates credit meters; steady work loves flat pricing.
- What does the free tier actually include? Run one real project end-to-end on free before paying for anything.
The cheapest tool is the one whose pricing model matches how you work — not the one with the lowest sticker price. And if you do decide to buy, annual plans on all four beat monthly by roughly two months' cost. I sell discounted 1-year plans for all of these at Chandia Digital Store — same tools, below official pricing, with a replacement warranty — because the official math above is exactly why the discount market exists.
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