AI Coding ROI Calculator

A credible ROIReturn on Investment. The value gained versus what it cost, the language an economic buyer funds deals in. Press Enter for the full definition. model starts from inputs you can defend later. Set the controls to match your team, then check the result against what you spend and ship.

Two inputs decide whether anyone believes this model. The first is the hourly cost of developer time. Use the fully loaded cost rather than salary alone, and write down what it includes so a reviewer can adjust it. The second is review time. Include it even though it is harder to measure and it lowers the result, because the first finance reviewer to open the model will look for it.

Show the costs you would rather leave out. A business case that hides review time or model spend will not survive a finance review.

• Sample size, repo type and task mix.
• Models, tool versions and seat cost used.
• Review time added by AI-generated changes.
• Where the result should not be generalized.

Put each assumption next to the number it drives. A finance reviewer who can see the seat cost and the review time can adjust them, instead of rejecting the whole model.

Cursor ships often, so advice about it can go out of date. The table summarizes Cursor's recent releases, so you can check this page against the current product. For each release's date and sources, see What's new in Cursor 2026.

At the accepted change rate. In the model above, that rate multiplies hours saved minus review time, and it never touches the seat cost. So a rejected change adds no value, and the review time it took drops out of the result as well. In a real week, someone still spent that time reviewing it.

The gap grows as acceptance falls. The lower your accepted change rate, the more review time the model leaves out, because rejected work leaves the arithmetic instead of showing up as waste.

To correct for it, do the acceptance arithmetic yourself. Set Accepted change rate to its maximum, and enter Hours saved only for the changes you kept. Then set Review time added to the hours spent reviewing everything the agent produced, including the work you threw away. The model now subtracts all of the review time from the value of the work that survived.

Expect an argument about review time. It is the input an optimist will try to talk down toward zero, and in this model it sits directly against hours saved. An hour trimmed from review time raises the result as much as an extra hour saved. If review time exceeds hours saved, the model shows zero value rather than a loss. Check both inputs against what you measured in the trial.

Only if your bill is seats alone. The model's cost side is seats times tool cost per seat. Cursor bills Teams for seats plus usage, and the usage works differently on its two plan families.

On The X SubscriptionThe subscription Cursor is sold through: one plan for Grok, Cursor and X, with Free, Plus, Premium, Super and Ultra tiers, per-seat Teams, a weekly included pool for Cursor models shared with Grok, and third-party models billed at API list price from prepaid credit. Press Enter for the full definition., each Teams seat (Premium, Super or Ultra) includes a weekly pool of usage for Cursor models. Third-party models, and Cursor-model usage past a seat's pool, are paid from a prepaid balance the team shares. Teams created before The X Subscription keep their legacy Standard and Premium seats. Each of those includes monthly usage across the Cursor ModelsOn legacy Cursor plans, the monthly usage pool for Cursor's own models (Grok 4.7, Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5 and Composer 2.5), kept separate from the third-party Other Models pool. The X Subscription replaces it with one weekly pool. Press Enter for the full definition. and Other ModelsOn legacy Cursor plans, the monthly pool for supported third-party models from providers such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, separate from Cursor Models. On The X Subscription third-party models are billed from prepaid credit instead. Press Enter for the full definition. pools, and usage beyond that runs on demand, billed in arrears.

Auto billing also changes with Router mode, and Cursor pricing explained has the current details. For the slider, use a blended number: seat price plus your trailing month of usage charges, divided by seats. If you haven't run a full month yet, you are estimating both halves, and your write-up should say so instead of implying a measurement.

The Tool cost slider also stops at $80 per seat. Premium seats and legacy Standard seats fit under that. A Super seat ($100 per user per month), an Ultra seat ($200) and a legacy Teams Premium seat ($120) don't. Model each of those groups as its own run instead of folding it into an average that hides it.

Check prices at cursor.com/pricing before anything goes into a budget, because they change.

Below roughly ten engineers, skip it. The result depends mostly on two guesses, hourly cost and hours saved. A two-week trial with a decision rule written down in advance settles the question faster than a model you can tune to give any answer you like.

Past fifty seats, build it, because the number is no longer for you. Someone in finance will read it, and what survives that reading is whether each input traces back to something you measured.

So save the inputs with the result: seats, blended tool cost, hourly cost, hours saved, review time, accepted change rate and the date you set them. Someone should be able to reconstruct the assumptions in three months. Put a name against each input as well. When an input is challenged six months later, its owner may have moved teams, and without a name nobody can say whether it was measured or guessed.

Then run the model again after a quarter, with the acceptance and review time you observed. The second run replaces estimates with measurements, so put it on the calendar when you present the first.