They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?
And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.
I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.
Whose pricing is above API rates? Not Cursor. It's 100% at each model provider's published API rate. With a bigger sub, you get it cheaper than that.
Cursor makes a ton of money because the product is great. It's easily the most sophisticated harness out there, and it isn't an IDE anymore. It's an agent dashboard since version 3.
Suffice it to say it's not all idiot money being thrown at them by users.
API rates on local models are quite cheap, and you can even run them locally. Yes, the hardware for doing so at speed is expensive, but people used to drop the equivalent of what would be $50k or $100k today on an individual workstation for full-time use. It's justified if the productivity gain is strong enough.
But that’s not competitive. The only reason to do that is out of need for privacy. Which is critical for some. The tradeoff is that the models are relatively bad. I don’t see how Cursor can win from this use case especially if to get the privacy benefit you need to spend a huge amount. You can already run Codex for free with local models too.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
That’s the thing, I have never seen detailed costs of what people are spending their money on. I know that for Claude there’s a $200 monthly subscription through which assigned credits one burns pretty fast, at which point (and I may be wrong on this, because I’ve never used the thing) one can run extra code on a “pay as you use it” basis? Again, I might be wrong on this.
I’ve also seen it mentioned a lot of people having 2, 3 or even more subscriptions, which I’m pretty sure that can easily go South when it comes to costs.
But, again, and the most important point, I’ve never seen a detailed post on what people spend on this AI thing on a monthly basis (let’s say).
A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.
Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.