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I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per day on additional requests. No
by ai_assisted_dev 1y ago
I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per day on additional requests. Now if I connect model provider APIs to windsurf, I'd be spending upwards of 100$ due to amount of tokens I use through the API per day. And if I connect my own API key to Cursor, I immediately get rate limited for any request, because I go well above 50 per minute. And I did try claude code, but its just not on par with my experience with Cursor.
I could probably go much lower, and find a model that is dirt cheap but takes a while; but right now the cutting edge (for my own work) is Claude 4 (non-max / non-thinking). To me it feels like Cursor must be hemorrhaging money. The thing that works for me is that I am able to justify those costs working on my own services, that has some customers, and each added feature gives me almost immediate return on investment. But to me it feels like the current rates that cursor charges are not rooted in reality.
Quickly checking Cursor for the past 4 day period:
Requests: 1049
Lines of Agent Edits: 301k
Tabs accepted: 84
Personally, I have very little complaints or issues with cursor. Only a growing wish list of more features and functionality. Like how cool would it be if asynchronous requests would work? Rather than just waiting for a single request to complete on 10 files, why can't it work on those 10 files in parralel at the same time? Because now so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor).
- shafyy 1y ago> I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. They don't make any money. They are burning VC money. Anthropic and OpenAI are probably also not making moeny, but Cursor is making "more no money" than others.
- wordofx 1y agoNo.
- m101 1y agoAre anthropic and openai making money (including training and infra costs)?
- hatefulmoron 1y agoFor OpenAI: short answer is no. From what I've seen, their biggest expense is training future models. If they stop that (putting aside the obvious downsides) they'd still be in the hole for a few billion dollars a year. This is based on what I've read here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the... (big AI bear, for what it's worth) edit: Well, if they shed the other expenses that only really make sense when training future models (research, more data, fewer employees ..) they would be pretty close to break even.
- JimDabell 1y agoThe market for AI-assisted development is exploding and token costs are plummeting all the time. It makes sense for them to subsidise usage to capture market share in the short-term with the expectation that servicing their users will cost them less in the future.
- aitchnyu 1y agoI use Aider with Openrouter and I keep wondering about the pricing of LLMs after providers decide to be profitable. Can we still afford a model which knows Python, Java and how to disrupt snail biology without poisoning mammals?
- ido 1y agoThe answer to that depends on when the VC bubble bursts- if it lasts long enough costs will eventually drop far enough. Pets.com was a .com-boom era joke but today I actually buy my pet-food online and I'm pretty sure nobody is subsidising me doing that.
- citizenpaul 1y agoThe.global food market is so heavily subsidized that is almoat impossible that your dog food is not subsidized. Animal feed is even more subsidized.
- dotancohen 1y agoCommercial animal feed is subsidized. So are some forms of human food in many countries. Pet food is not subsidized in my country nor the EU. If any countries do subsidize pet food, they are the exception. Maybe the US? Pet food is often manufactured from the waste of other processes, including the human food industry, but that is not a subsidiary.
- windward 1y agoAll EU countries provide income support to farmers.
- ipnon 1y agoIt hints that there could be real capital deployment limits to a near-term future of artificial intelligence explosion.
- ukuina 1y ago> so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor). You can open up to three parallel chat tabs by pressing Cmd+T https://docs.cursor.com/kbd https://docs.cursor.com/kbd Each chat tab is a full Agent by itself!
- sfmike 1y agoThis won't create race conditions all of them will know the others live accept of commit to directory? or have to wait then hit enter on other tab instantly after?
- ukuina 1y agoThey handle file locking by themselves. "File1 is currently awaiting edit approval, accept its changes and continue here?"
- jama211 1y agoI still worry this could cause issues even with file locking, if one is reading a file to understand how something is structured and another tab does a refactor on that moments later…
- jama211 1y agoThanks for this
- wg0 1y agoI'm curious what's your usage. How much different it is from Claude based Copilot. Both are genuine questions.
- ai_assisted_dev 1y agoDo you mean Claude Code? Or something else? As for usage, do you mean the product I am working on? Happy to answer.
- wg0 1y agoI meant you're using Cursor (I assume Claud as the model) and also wondering that you go over monthly usages and then what product/project is that where you find it so useful that you have such a usage. I have used or rather use Claud with CoPilot and I find it pretty useful but at times it gets stuck in niche areas.
- GaboGomez 1y agoThe last feature you mentioned on your wish list is literally one of the new features in the major release. I’m hyped
- cess11 1y ago"Lines of Agent Edits: 301k" What does this measurement mean? 1049 / (4 * 8) ~= 32 seconds, on average. Doesn't look like much waiting to me.
- h1fra 1y agothey say they are making hundreds of millions, but they never say how much of it is going to GPU cost. If I had to guess, they are burning everything and far from being profitable
- wussboy 1y agoIf history has taught us anything, it's that unless full accounting data is released, there is a reason that full accounting data is not being released, and that reason would almost certainly paint the company in a bad light.
- adidoit 1y agoThe play is probably - Expand and get lock in - Custom fine-tuned models (much cheaper) for increasing # of completions - Enterprise contracts
- usrbinbash 1y agoThat works in systems that exhibit economy of scale. The problem with generative ai workloads: The costs rise linerly with the number of requests, because you need to compute every query.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoGPU type and utilization mean that the costs likely rise only logarithmically or sub-linear. If you commit to buying enough inference over long enough, someone can buy a rack of the newest custom inference chips and run them at 100% for you, which may be a lot cheaper per request than doing them on a cpu somewhere.
- usrbinbash 1y agoI disagree tbh. I mean, I accept that new silicon will have better power usage and probably be more efficient in terms of flops/Joule, but there would need to be a major technical breakthrought to get a logarithmic relationship between N requests and inference cost. N requests at P flops, still means I need C x P flops for C x N requests. A not-so-steep linear relationship is still linear.
- toephu2 1y agoGoogle's Jules supposedly can handle that: "An Asynchronous Coding Agent" https://jules.google/ https://jules.google/