Sign in to Cursor and choose a plan

On a fresh install, Cursor doesn’t yet know who you are: the Agent sidebar (Cursor’s chat panel, opened with Cmd/Ctrl+I) will prompt you to sign in before it does anything useful. This is the shortest consequential lesson in the chapter - the click itself is trivial, but the account you sign in with decides what the agent can do and what Cursor is allowed to retain when your code passes through its servers, and that’s worth thirty seconds of attention before the agent starts reading code you didn’t write.

Signing in to the desktop app

You don’t manage a password inside Cursor. On first run the app surfaces a Sign in prompt (the exact label may vary by version); clicking it opens your browser, you authorize the session against your Cursor account, and you land back in the editor logged in. If you don’t already have an account you create one in that same browser step. There’s nothing to copy-paste and no key to manage for interactive work at your own desk - the browser round-trip is the whole flow.

Your account isn’t only a login. It’s the thing that carries your plan and its usage allowance, so the same sign-in that unlocks the editor is also what meters the agent. Cursor’s individual tiers run a free tier, then paid Plus, Premium, Super, and Ultra (as of October 2026, cursor.com/pricing); the older Hobby, Pro, and Pro+ names continue only on legacy plans for existing customers (models and pricing), and Teams and Enterprise layer admin controls on top - and the free tier is enough to follow this chapter. The point worth holding onto: the account is the unit everything attaches to - your plan, your usage pool, your settings, and the privacy posture below all hang off this one sign-in.

The same account signs in the CLI

Cursor also ships a terminal agent - a CLI you’ll meet properly in a much later chapter - and it shares this account. You authenticate it once, the same way:

agent login

That opens the same browser flow and stores the credential locally; agent status confirms who you’re signed in as, and agent logout clears it. The agent command has been the CLI’s primary entrypoint since January 2026, and cursor-agent remains as a backward-compatible alias for older scripts and tutorials (CLI changelog).

For unattended use - CI, a scheduled job, anything with no human to click a browser prompt - the browser path is exactly wrong, the same way it is for any agent. There the CLI authenticates with a user API key instead, generated from the Cursor dashboard and passed as CURSOR_API_KEY (or --api-key). You don’t need it for anything this hour - just file away that the interactive door (browser) and the automation door (API key) are different doors, and the headless chapter walks through the second one.

The privacy setting attached to your account

Here’s the part that earns this lesson its thirty seconds. Tied to your account is Privacy Mode, a setting that governs what Cursor is allowed to retain when your code passes through its servers. It’s a real toggle - settable per account, and enforceable across a whole team or organization - and the trade-off is concrete:

• With Privacy Mode on, Cursor says Customer Data is not used for training, and it maintains zero-data-retention agreements with model providers, subject to abuse/security classifiers and provider-specific exceptions. Cursor may temporarily cache encrypted file contents during a request. (Data Use & Privacy)
• Code search itself stays local. Cursor’s codebase search - Instant Grep, as of September 2026 - builds and queries its index on your machine: Cursor does not upload file paths or code to build a search index, and it does not store embeddings of your codebase for search. What does reach Cursor’s servers is the code the agent actually opens while working on your request, which becomes part of the model request - and that is the traffic Privacy Mode governs. (Agent search docs)

For budgetcli - the course’s illustrative repo, a personal-finance API with your own money in it - those distinctions are not academic, which is exactly why they surface this early. How the agent finds and pulls the right files into a turn gets its own treatment in the context chapter later in the course. For this hour, know the toggle exists, know which way it leans for code you care about, and leave it where your team’s policy puts it until that chapter gives you the full picture.

Confirm the agent is alive

One quick check before you move on. Open the Agent sidebar, type a harmless question about the repo - “what does this codebase do?” - and send it. A coherent answer that references actual files means three things at once: you’re signed in, your plan’s agent access is live, and Cursor can read your workspace.

You’re signed in, the agent answers, and you know what your account switched on. Next, the part that trips people up: the two AI surfaces - the Agent sidebar and Tab, Cursor’s inline completion - aren’t interchangeable, and reaching for the wrong one is a common early mistake. Next: Agent sidebar vs Tab.