Cursor is a team of young and smart people who formed
just a few years ago to build such an amazing tool
While this opaque pricing gives a poor user experience, and maybe it was a poor decision, everyone makes mistakes, learns from them, and grows to do better
Regardless of the new pricing model or the old pricing. For me. It’s long since paid for itself. I can’t really imagine how on earth this tool is profitable as it is so much cheaper compared to calling the API. In the picture I just opened a twenty dollar subscription.
I had made an AI chat type URL and then realized it was too costly. Big models wanting to have context require very large input and cache tokens, which cost more to input and cache than output, and I can’t believe that，Maybe that’s why so many tools are priced according to tokens!
dam, and i thought my ultra long 3 mil tokens rabbithole prompt was a bit over the top haha, 87 mil, holy f. what did you do? refactor the whole code base three times in one prompt?^^
it’s a valid way, user trust is important but they can’t keep not making changes, claude 3.5 to claude 4 model request once the cost has increased a lot.
I remember last year’s AI could only do one unit at a time, more than that and there were all sorts of errors and so on.
I don’t know, something feels off.
There are people who subscribed to the tool and on the same day it shows their plan covered $102 — that definitely shows there’s still a lack of transparency.
They’re a wrapper, so how does a $20 plan let you use $295 worth of API?
Does that make sense?
At what point are they making money — or are we the ones losing?
Calling the API way to use $100 a day isn’t much, any tool I’ve tried it is, and in less than an hour $10 is gone (sonnet)
In terms of API pricing. I think we still made a profit.
If you charge at twenty dollars for the API, you run out of credit in a few hours, and anyone who has used their own API knows that’s a horrendous cost
This is an inevitable result, no tool can subsidize users forever, it is likely that this year or next year other IDEs will also gradually increase prices
Last year to now, as the AI modeling capabilities improve, a conversation can perform more tasks. Means consuming more tokens API cost remains the same, but tokens skyrocketed and the cost doubled several times.
In fact, $20 can buy 100 conversations is good, now a conversation consumes tens of thousands of tokens on average, more if you need to search the web…
Here’s the thing about the tokens. Cursor adds layers to this that inflate the tokens by 10x. Go use claude code and watch your token usage plummet. I get a lot out of anthropic subscription now, kind of like how cursor used to be. Now cursor isn’t even worth the 60. Id pay 60 if it was worth it but 20 at Anthropic does more. Cursor not showing UI of when a person can work again is perhaps the most ridiculous thing.
I think there is a huge disconnect in how people think this works. API pricing is NOT what they put. That’s api pricing for individuals without business emails. Businesses with large spend get MASSIVE savings on compute. Up to 90% cheaper for those spending millions. Look at Claude code. Just spending $200 gets the user 20x what they spend $20 for. That’s 50% less money for the compute. These companies are buying millions of $$$. They are not charged what we are charged. They are making a lot of money.
