Paying for Cursor and GitHub Copilot? How to spot the overlap

Why teams end up paying twice

A common path: the company switches on Copilot for its GitHub organization, then engineers ask for Cursor. Both put AI completion and chat in the editor, so most people settle on one. The other seat keeps billing, because neither tool’s admin console can see the other.

USD, list prices as of October 2026, from cursor.com/pricing and GitHub Docs.

What each admin console shows

What neither shows is the other tool. Two more caveats: Copilot only records editor activity when the user has telemetry enabled in their IDE, so an empty date is a question, not a verdict; and Cursor’s Admin API is Enterprise-only, so on Teams the export is a manual download.

How to check it by hand

1. In Cursor, open Usage Analytics, choose the last 30 days and download the active users as CSV.
2. In GitHub, list your Copilot seats with their last activity. The REST endpoint GET /orgs/{org}/copilot/billing/seats returns each seat with last_activity_at.
3. Match the lists. Cursor lists people by email and GitHub by username, so keep your team list at hand.
4. Sort people into three groups: Cursor only, Copilot only, both. In the “both” group, daily Cursor use and no Copilot activity for 30 days means the Copilot seat is idle. The reverse happens too.
5. Remove the idle seats before the next billing cycle starts. When you remove a Copilot seat, billing for it continues until the end of the current cycle.

One side effect to check: Copilot plans include AI credits in line with the seat price, and credits can be pooled across the organization, so fewer seats also means a smaller shared pool. Code completions don’t use credits, but heavy chat and agent users might notice.

How SeatLeak automates it

SeatLeak reads Copilot seats and last activity through GitHub’s admin API and Cursor activity from your team’s usage export, then matches people across both. Engineers who use one assistant every day and the other not once in 30 days show up as one priced line, like the “4 engineers pay for Copilot and Cursor” finding in our sample demo. Because GitHub’s API allows it, removing those Copilot seats is one click.

SeatLeak opens to teams in the order they sign up, starting this winter. Until then, the calculator on our home page estimates what your team is likely leaking across all its tools.