How I Conquered Cursor IDE’s 500 Request Limit and Supercharged My AI Coding Workflow
June 19, 2025How I Uncovered Cursor IDE’s Hidden Pricing and Solved My Usage Confusion
June 19, 2025
As a student diving into AI development, I was thrilled when I found Cursor IDE. Their student plan sounded perfect—until I hit a wall of exclusion that made me cancel my subscription. Let me share what happened and what I learned.
The Core Problem: Unexpected Barriers to Access
When I tried to sign up for Cursor’s student plan, I found out it wasn’t available in my country. It also wasn’t available in many others, including Turkey and India.
Cursor told me they had verification issues. But then I discovered that their verification partner, SheerID, actually does support student checks worldwide. This felt less like a technical problem and more like a choice to leave out students from places where affordable tools are a big deal.
Digging Deeper: The Real Reasons Behind the Policy
I contacted support to ask why. They said they were worried about fraud, so they restricted the plan. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
For example, even in countries like Germany and Canada, many universities don’t use .edu domains. They use .de or .ca instead. So students there get left out too. That made me realize: this policy isn’t just about fraud. It’s excluding real students who need access.
What You Can Do If This Happens to You
If you’re in the same boat, here are some steps that might help:
- Check if you qualify: Contact Cursor support to see if they can manually verify your student status. Sometimes they can make exceptions.
- Speak up: Tell Cursor your story using their feedback channels. If enough people do this, they might change their policy.
- Look at other options: Try VS Code with GitHub Student benefits. It works almost everywhere and has similar AI tools.
My Lesson and a Hope for the Future
Cancelling my subscription wasn’t easy, but it taught me something important: always check the fine print on student plans.
Now, I only support tools that include everyone. I hope you’ll do the same. Together, we can push the tech industry to be fairer to students everywhere.
