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AgentStack
recipes / beginner · 8 min

Setting a sane budget for AI coding tools as a working engineer

Stop guessing — concrete monthly numbers for solo devs, small teams, and consultancies.

Stack: Cursor Claude Code GitHub Copilot

The AI tools market in 2026 is a bewildering pricing soup. Here’s how I’d budget for three persona types.

Solo dev (consulting / freelancing)

Monthly: $30-80

  • 1 daily-driver IDE: Cursor Pro ($20) or Copilot Individual ($10).
  • 1 agentic CLI: Claude Code on Pro plan ($20) or OpenCode (free, your own keys).
  • API budget for ad-hoc: $10-30.

Why this works: your time is the bottleneck. Don’t penny-pinch the tools that save 20% of your day. Bill it back to clients as “tooling”.

5-person product team

Monthly: $400-800

  • Cursor Business ($40 × 5 = $200)
  • Claude Code on Max plan for 2 senior engineers ($100 × 2 = $200)
  • Shared OpenAI/Anthropic API budget ($100-300)

Skip Copilot Business unless your company already has GitHub Enterprise — then it’s worth $19 × 5 for the integration.

30-engineer org

Monthly: $4k-12k

  • Cursor Enterprise (custom, ~$50/seat)
  • Copilot Enterprise (~$39/seat) — really only if you have GitHub Enterprise SSO needs
  • Anthropic Enterprise plan for governed Claude Code rollout
  • API spend governance via Helicone or LangFuse — you’ll need it

Set a per-team budget alert. Without alerts, API spend goes from $200/mo to $5k/mo overnight when one engineer makes a stuck agent loop.

Open-source-only setup ($0/mo, +API)

If you absolutely refuse to pay for IDE-side AI:

  • Continue in VS Code/JetBrains
  • Cline or Roo Code for agentic
  • Aider for terminal
  • OpenCode for CLI agents
  • BYOK: $20-100/mo on API providers

Total: $20-100/mo, all open source UI layer.

What’s NOT worth paying for

  • Multiple Pro IDE subscriptions (Cursor + Copilot + Cody) — pick one, save money.
  • “AI security review” startup tools that charge $99/mo for what claude --review does for $0.20.
  • “AI code review” SaaS that’s a wrapper around GPT — it’s competitive with claude --review running in CI for free if you have Claude Code.

ROI math

A working engineer in the US/EU costs roughly $80-150/hour fully loaded. If a $40/mo tool saves you 30 minutes a week, it’s already paid for itself 8×. The upside ceiling for high-leverage uses (large refactors, test coverage in legacy code) is much higher.

The mistake is not paying — it’s paying for too many overlapping tools.