I Spent $11,922 on Cursor in Under 4 Weeks. Here's How I Fixed It.

Let me just say the number out loud so it lands properly: $11,922. Not over a year. Not a team of 20 devs. Me. Less than four weeks. One person. Building stuff across 6 projects simultaneously with parallel AI agents running in Cursor. I have the billing screenshots. They're real. And they were a wake-up call. This isn't a balanced "here are pros and cons" comparison piece. This is a post-mortem on how I accidentally turned an AI coding tool into a money furnace in under a month, and how I cut that bill by 95% without losing the workflow I'd built. ─── How It Started Late January 2026. I'm deep in product build mode — six different projects running in parallel. Actual concurrent development: a SaaS app, a client API, a data pipeline, two internal tools, and a side project I kept telling myself was "nearly done." Six Cursor windows open simultaneously, each pointed at a different project, each running parallel AI agents. Background tasks cranking through the backlog while I focused on w