Cursor Affiliate and Referral Program

The referral program ended, and the reason Cursor gives

Cursor's help centre is blunt: it ended the referral program for Cursor plans because of increased fraud, and new invites and rewards are no longer available. Credits you earned before the shutdown stay on your account and still apply to eligible charges. Links you saved from the old program no longer give a new sign-up any discount or reward.

A fraud shutdown is worth taking at face value. Referral credit on a developer tool with usage-based costs is exactly what self-referral rings target, and a company that closes the scheme for that reason is unlikely to reopen it as a cash affiliate program. If you see a "Cursor referral link" in a listicle today, it does nothing for the reader.

The legitimate discounts left are the ones Cursor names itself: about 20% off on yearly billing, and student offers.

Cursor is now a tier of The X Subscription

This is the change since our August check. On 12 October 2026 SpaceX Super Intelligence, the company xAI became after SpaceX acquired it, launched The X Subscription: one plan covering Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium, with a pool of Grok model usage shared between Grok and Cursor. Cursor's own pricing page now shows those tiers: Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200 a month. Third-party models in Cursor are billed separately at API list prices.

Existing Cursor subscribers can keep their old plan or switch with a prorated refund. For anyone hoping for a Cursor affiliate program, the practical consequence is that any future program would be SpaceXSI's, covering the whole bundle, not Cursor's alone.

The Grok Bot invite pays usage, not money

The gift icon some Cursor and Grok users now see is the Grok Bot referral program, which Cursor documents on the same help page as the closed one. It is real and active, but rolling out gradually.

• Who can refer: paid individual Premium, Super or Ultra on The X Subscription, billed in the US, bought on the web rather than through an app store, and at least 7 days after checkout. Plus, team seats and legacy Cursor or SuperGrok plans cannot refer.
• Your friend gets: their first 2 weeks of Grok Bot free.
• You get: a usage limit reset, recorded 7 days after the friend's first payment and valid for 6 months. A refund or dispute removes it.

A usage reset has value only to someone who hits their limit. It is not a channel for publishers, and nothing in it pays cash.

No resellers, and a partner network for firms only

The X Subscription pricing page says subscriptions are sold only directly through X Subscription Corp, that no resellers or third-party sellers are authorised, and that accounts bought elsewhere may be suspended. Any site offering discounted Cursor seats is outside those terms.

The one formal partner channel is the SpaceX Super Intelligence Partner Network, announced on 22 October 2026. It admits two kinds of company: transformation partners, the consultancies and integrators that deploy Grok and Cursor for enterprises, and marketplace partners that publish plugins. It describes training, accreditation and joint-customer support, not a referral fee.

Coding-adjacent programs that do pay

If your readers are developers or builders, the commission sits with tools adjacent to Cursor rather than with Cursor. Pickaxe, a no-code builder for AI agents and apps, and 10Web, an AI website builder, both run open affiliate programs with published terms; their pages on this site show what we verified.

We recheck this page on a 30 day cycle. With the product now part of a bundle that changed shape in October, it is the kind of page that can change again.