Tutorial: routing Cursor to custom or free models without Pro

On October 31, 2026, a developer published a tutorial on DEV Community explaining how to connect custom and free AI models to Cursor without a Pro subscription. The core idea is to route completion requests to the developer's own API endpoint or to a model hosted locally.

The steps are as follows: open Cursor Settings -> Models and turn off default model overrides, then enable the OpenAI API Key, expand the Advanced options, and enter a custom Base URL. Once this is done, completion requests can go directly to a local GPU instance running Ollama, or to a local vLLM service.

The article also includes an accompanying suggestion: use a .cursorignore file to exclude build artifacts and node_modules, so that Cursor does not index the whole repository and burn tokens unnecessarily.

As the post describes it, Cursor IDE offers access to frontier models under its subscription tiers, while the custom model settings provide a separate path for developers to plug in their own API endpoints or locally hosted models. No further follow-up report is available at this point, so the configuration method stands as outlined in this single tutorial.