The pattern emerged quietly at first. On March 17, something shifted in the billing daemon. One dev—a senior frontend engineer relying on Cursor's Opus 4.6 high-thinking mode as their daily driver—noticed their per-call costs had spiked from a consistent $0.08 to $0.72 overnight. Same model. Same projects. Same token volumes. By March 26, the costs had stabilized at a new, nightmarish equilibrium: $1.00–$1.40 per call.

Over the span of just 29 days, their daily bill had metastasized from ~$10 to ~$170. The meter had run up $1,729 in overages. But here's where it gets truly unsettling: the $0.08 calls didn't stop. They never stopped. Interspersed among the bloated $1+ charges were sporadic transactions at the original price—1,241 calls at exactly $0.08, coexisting with 1,891 calls at variable, inflated rates. No clean cutoff. No logical explanation.

The dev pulled their full usage CSV and cross-referenced matched pairs. A half-million token request that had cost $0.08 in early March cost $0.43 in late March—a 5x multiplier. A million-token call jumped from $0.08 to $1.71. A five-million-token request climbed to $4.74. The pattern held across their entire call log: identical work, vastly different prices. The gradual climb from March 17 through March 26 suggested not a sudden quota exhaustion, but something more sinister—a slow, deliberate recalibration of the billing engine.

They ruled out the obvious culprits: no model switching, token counts were stable, no rogue extensions firing in the background. The $0.08 calls persisted even though early March usage would have burned through a $20 monthly Teams quota in days—yet they kept showing up for weeks. The $0.08 rate wasn't an included allowance. It was a phantom price, appearing and disappearing without pattern or explanation.

As of April 7, the mystery remained unsolved. The dev filed a support ticket, but the damage was done. One thousand seven hundred twenty-nine dollars in ghost charges, each one mathematically identical to the last in form, but spiritually corrupted in cost. The question lingered: What had Cursor changed in those ten days? And why was it still changing calls to two different prices, as if two billing realities were occupying the same system?