Honest side-by-side.
Every cell is verifiable against published rates and feature pages. Where a competitor does something Fred can't, we say so.
Per-session cost
Worked example: 100K input + 20K output tokens. Rates from each provider's published pricing page.
Fred · $0.049
Claude Sonnet 4 · $0.600
GPT-4o · $0.450
| Fred | Claude Code (Sonnet 4) | Cursor CLI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | PAYG credits | PAYG (API) | Subscription ($20/mo) |
| Billing transparency | Per-token, per-call | Per-token | Request-count gated |
| Streaming SSE responses | yes | yes | yes |
| Permission gating UX | yes | partial | yes |
| Open-source CLI | yes | yes | no |
| Works in pure terminal (no IDE required) | yes | yes | no |
| Bring-your-own-key supported | yes (skip the proxy) | yes | no |
Cursor's per-token cost can't be quoted directly because their CLI bills against a flat-rate request quota rather than per-token. Cost-per-session bars show only the providers that publish per-token rates.