Yeah, for sure. That's why I tried Cursor for a month. But as soon as I ran out of fast requests it became unusable. It had me waiting several minutes for the first token. I didn't realize how bad the experience was, fast requests included, until I used Void. It makes Cursor fast requests seem slow, and I tend to need fewer of them. The differences being that Void requests go straight to the provider instead of their own server first, and their system prompts seem to keep the models more on task.
That's fair. It is not the cheaper option, unless you use free or low cost models from a provider like OpenRouter. Of course, that comes with a performance hit. What I like about it is the flexibility. I run Devstral Small locally for easier tasks and it's free except for electricity. On the other hand, you can use up $20 with Gemini Pro in a couple hours with large contexts. Grok 3 mini has been a good middle ground- more capable than Devstral and less expensive than Gemini Pro.
So I tend to start with Devstral unless I know it will struggle, and then move on to paid models as needed. When I do switch to a paid provider, it's noticeably better than the same provider on a Cursor paid plan, so even though it's more expensive, I feel like there's more value there.
I honestly don't have a proper monthly tally yet. I've used $30 in OpenRouter credits over a couple weeks, but a lot of that was experimenting to compare quality of output.
