Composer 2.5 Matches Opus 4.7 at One-Tenth the Cost
May 27, 2026 | AI Tools & Business
Cursor released Composer 2.5 on May 18th. It costs $0.07 per coding task. Claude Code running Opus 4.7 costs $4.14 for the same task. On two of three public benchmarks, Composer 2.5 scores within one point of Opus 4.7. That gap is worth paying attention to.
What the Benchmarks Actually Show
Cursor submitted Composer 2.5 to Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index, which composites three benchmarks: SWE-Bench-Pro-Hard, Terminal-Bench v2, and SWE-Atlas-QnA. Composer 2.5 placed third with a score of 63.
First place: Claude Code with Opus 4.7 (Max) at 67. Second place: Codex with GPT-5.5 (XHigh) at 65.
Broken out by benchmark:
- SWE-Bench Multilingual: Composer 2.5 scores 79.8%. Opus 4.7 scores 80.5%. GPT-5.5 is not far behind.
- CursorBench v3.1: Composer 2.5 scores 63.2%, edging Opus 4.7 (61.6%) and GPT-5.5 (59.2%).
- Terminal-Bench 2.0: GPT-5.5 wins clearly at 82.7%. Composer 2.5 and Opus 4.7 tie at roughly 69%.
The pattern is consistent: for most coding tasks, Composer 2.5 trades within the same accuracy band as models that cost 10 to 60 times more per token.
The Cost Gap Is Not Close
Composer 2.5 Standard runs at $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 4.7 is priced at $5 input and $25 output. GPT-5.5 runs $5 input and $30 output.
At the task level, the numbers look like this:
| Model | Per-Task Cost |
|---|---|
| Composer 2.5 Standard | $0.07 |
| Composer 2.5 Fast | $0.44 |
| Claude Code Opus 4.7 (Max) | $4.14 |
| Codex GPT-5.5 (XHigh) | $4.33 |
If you run 1,000 coding tasks a month, the difference between Composer 2.5 Standard and Opus 4.7 Max is roughly $4,070. At scale, that is not a rounding error.
Where GPT-5.5 Still Wins
GPT-5.5 holds a real lead on Terminal-Bench 2.0, which tests shell-driven autonomous workflows. At 82.7% versus Composer's 69.3%, that is a 13-point gap. If your work involves AI agents running long terminal sessions, executing commands, or operating autonomously in a shell environment, GPT-5.5 earns its price premium there.
Opus 4.7 also has a strong lead on vision tasks (98.5% visual acuity, up from 54.5% on Opus 4.6) and finance agent benchmarks. If your coding workflow is tightly coupled to image processing or financial data, those scores matter.
For standard software engineering tasks: writing code, fixing bugs, handling pull requests, navigating real codebases, Composer 2.5 keeps up.
What This Means Practically
The frontier model pricing made sense when frontier was the only option for reliable agentic coding. That is no longer the case.
Composer 2.5 is available in Cursor IDE and Cursor CLI. It is not available as a standalone API. That means this cost advantage is specific to teams already in the Cursor ecosystem.
For everyone else, the takeaway is the direction of travel. Capable coding models are getting dramatically cheaper. The question to ask before defaulting to Opus or GPT-5.5 for any coding task is: what specifically does this task require that a cheaper model cannot do? Terminal-heavy autonomous agents: GPT-5.5. Complex visual or financial reasoning: Opus 4.7. Everything else: run the benchmark, check the price.
Paying 60 times more for 6% better performance on two of three benchmarks is a choice, not a requirement.
Sources: Artificial Analysis: Cursor's Composer 2.5 -- third on the Coding Agent Index. The Decoder: Cursor's Composer 2.5 matches Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. ChatForest: Cursor Composer 2.5 Review -- 79.8% SWE-Bench, Claude Opus 4.7 Parity, 10x Cheaper.
Written by Travis Raveling, Founder PAID LLC, co-authored and edited by AI.
About PAID LLC: We help businesses understand, implement, and get ROI from AI tools and emerging technology. Learn more at paiddev.com/about.