Unbelievable: You will get $200 as long as you show the screenshot of your Claude subscription cancellation, Cursor is going completely crazy poaching talents.

One screenshot, 200 US dollars.

Just yesterday, netizen @notjazii woke up in the morning and found an extra 200 dollars in his Cursor account. All he did was send the screenshot of his Claude subscription cancellation to the Cursor team.

He posted: I did nothing, just submitted a cancellation screenshot, and 200 dollars arrived in my account.

With this 200 dollars, he can almost use Grok 4.6 as much as he wants.

The screenshot of canceling Claude's subscription has become a hard currency overnight.

A post that "might get me in trouble"

It all started the day before. On August 17, Cursor engineer Lauren (@poteto) spoke publicly on X. The post was extremely straightforward:

"I might get yelled at for this post, but if you're thinking of switching to Cursor with Grok Bot, send me a private message with your email and a screenshot of canceling other subscriptions, and I'll give you a free month of Ultra."

Ultra is the most expensive tier in Cursor's personal plan, 200 US dollars per month, which includes large quotas for proprietary models such as Grok 4.6 and Composer, plus 400 US dollars worth of third-party model usage.

In other words, this offer is the top-tier plan for free.

As a result, the comment section blew up immediately. A large number of netizens started to take action right away.

Soon, another developer @spcxGOD also showed the credits he received: about 180 dollars in credits, also for the reason of canceling the Claude subscription.

Thousands of private messages went unanswered

However, don't get too excited too early.

A large number of people sent their emails and screenshots, and then nothing happened.

Netizen @alexkelerman said he sent a private message but was ignored, and many people below replied "same".

Some people advised everyone not to panic, saying that the staff was just processing the messages one by one. Others put it bluntly: If I really get the free Ultra, I will promote Cursor crazily.

Queuing is only the first hurdle. The more frustrating part is this: some people found that only X Premium members are eligible to send her private messages. Unverified users can't even find the entry, and some can't even reply to the original post.

Netizen @play_loh directly lashed out: If you can't get the free Ultra, this is fraud.

Because there were too many private messages, Lauren later specially created a bot to process them in batches.

The most frustrating comment came from netizen mishka. He said: An army of bots can't process thousands of private messages in 16 hours, which is not a good advertisement for Grok Bot.

However, this is not surprising. This is not an official action organized by Cursor, but just a personal act of the employee Lauren.

But the money was indeed sent out, and many people have received it.

Why is a screenshot worth 200 US dollars

On August 14, SpaceX completed the acquisition of Cursor for 60 billion US dollars. Cursor officially became a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX and was integrated into the SpaceX AI team.

Musk once said in an internal meeting: Before September, AI revenue will exceed the total revenue of all other SpaceX businesses.

But the problem is that Musk has not been able to outperform Claude Code in the AI programming track.

The successful acquisition of Cursor just gave Musk a chance to overtake, as millions of developers open this platform every day.

Now, Cursor is taking advantage of the momentum to continue to attack Claude Code.

That 200-dollar cancellation screenshot is more like an inducement for you to migrate. You move your projects, shortcuts and work habits over today, and he bets that you will renew your subscription yourself next month.

The script of subsidy wars on Internet platforms has finally been staged in the circle of AI programming tools.

And this is probably the most memorable part of this incident. For the first time, developers' loyalty has a public price: 200 US dollars, redeemable with a screenshot.

References:

https://x.com/notjazii/status/2089636713413128233

https://x.com/poteto/status/2089369732554404153

https://x.com/Daniel_Farinax/status/2089390969900990541

https://cursor.com/help/account-and-billing/pricing

https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing

This article is from the WeChat official account "AI Era", author: ASI Revelation, published with authorization from 36Kr.