The Limit That Says Per Member
One user blew past what the cap implied. The label and the behavior did not match.
I took over Cursor admin recently. They wanted someone to own the company's AI tooling.
The spend limit was already set: a per-member cap, multiplied by seat count. Standard admin hygiene for a dev team.
Then one member ran up on-demand charges alone. Far more than their share. Nearly the whole budget.
The UI said "per member." They read that as each person stops at their cap. That is the natural reading.
Support clarified: the label is math, not enforcement. Per-member amount times seats equals one shared pool. Any single user can burn the whole thing before anyone gets blocked.
Per-user hard caps existed. Cursor told me they were deprecated on self-serve Team plans on December 5, 2025. Enterprise only now.
The product looked safer for budget control than it was.
Is this a dark pattern? Yes. The label creates a false affordance. The real behavior lives in small print below. Alerts notify you. They do not stop anyone. Turning off on-demand entirely is the only hard brake on self-serve.
I turned off on-demand while figuring out what to do next.
I build interfaces for a living. I know what "per member" implies. Cursor knows too.
The limit that says per member does not limit per member.
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