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Clarifying our pricing
- minimaxir 1y agoDid they really drop this news at Friday night, on a holiday?
- mceoin 1y agoI was wondering who would catch that.
- joshdavham 1y agoThat's startups for you!
- bravesoul2 1y agoIt's 9am on a workday somewhere in the world. Let's work!
- tom_m 1y agoMaximum panic mode activated.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoCursor is an interesting case study on the wrapper vs. core debate. They were the first big success story in the coding space, enjoyed first mover advantages, and sweetheart deals with volume tokens from providers. Now that all the providers have moved towards in-housing their coding solutions, the sweetheart deals are gone. And the wrapper goes back to "at cost" usage. Which, on paper should be less value / $ than any of the tiers offered by the providers themselves. Whatever data they collected, and whatever investments they made in core tech remains to be seen. And it's a question of making use of that data. We can see that it is highly valuable for providers (as they all subsidise usage to an extent). Goog is offering lots of stuff for free, presumably to collect data. One interesting distinction is on cursor vs. windsurf. Windsurf actually developed some internal models (either pre-trained or post-trained I don't know, but probably doesn't matter much) swe1 and swe1-lite that are actually pretty good on their own. I don't think cursor has done that, beyond their tab-next-prediction model. A clue, perhaps. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all unfolds 2-5 years from now.
- jerpint 1y agoCursor developed their own tab models IIRC
- fullstackwife 1y agobut Gemini is perfect for tab completion, and the price for Gemini will be always lower
- tom_m 1y agoThere's is absolutely nothing that Cursor has that anyone else can't easily and doesn't already. In fact better. Open-source solutions already outpace Cursor. The difference is open-source doesn't exactly have a giant marketing budget. So most people haven't caught on yet, but they will.
- mahmoudimus 1y agoWho is better for that tab completion?
- rubslopes 1y agoI think they bought it for SuperMaven.
- bravesoul2 1y agoI saw an ad today OpenAI offering free AI interior design mock-up. Not sure if it a specific feature or just way to use image generation but either way they are commoditizing the thin wrappers.
- bGl2YW5j 1y agoI’m interested if anyone here knows what exactly Cursor has built? My limited understanding is that they’ve done nothing but fork VS code and add a chat window and AI-integrated editing tools.
- stavros 1y ago
- jekwoooooe 1y agoCursor isn’t good. They mangle good models with bad prompts
- csomar 1y agotl;dr: They are f*ked and they have no way out. $20 on API pricing is what Claude Pro will give you in a day. It doesn't matter how good cursor is, this is a massive limitation and price differential that they can't overcome. Even if they go with DeepSeek which is much cheaper, they are still significantly more expensive than a Claude subscription.
- likium 1y agoThat's what Claude Pro will give you... now. As with Cursor there's no guarantee that it'll last. Next year, next month, next week, they may change their pricing when the competition runs dry.
- senko 1y agoWith competition being Microsoft and Google, that might take a while ...
- csomar 1y agoIt'll not last but it might last longer than Cursor can remain solvent.
- tom_m 1y agoThey aren't the reseller. Also, that wonderful big beautiful bill in the US just limited what states and government can do to AI. It's a clear and open highway for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc. They don't have to worry about any kinda rug pulling on Cursor or anything. They can literally compete with their "customers" and put their "customers" or "partners" out of business with zero consequences.
- cpursley 1y agoI’ve deleted all of these wrappers (cursor, windsurf etc) after discovering Claude Code on pro. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s just better. And ultimately, more cost effective.
- rorads 1y agoI think it’s fundamentally about context management and business model. Claude Code is expensive because it will happily put very large volumes into context because Anthropic are paid by the token. Cursor makes the bet that it can pay less per token whilst giving you enough value to still make margins on your $20 per month (assuming you’re using their default models). This all becomes very clear when you do something that feels like magic in Claude Code and then run /cost and see you’ve blown through $10 in a single hour long session. Which is honestly worth it for me.
- tom_m 1y agoRoo Code manages context a LOT better than Cursor or Windsurf. Cursor and Windsurf don't care about this because they want people to use more tokens. Their investors want more people to use tokens. Think about this one. They don't even tell you what your usage is! Look at Roo Code showing you the context usage and cost of each conversation. Features to compact the context. It's built around bringing awareness to the unit economics of AI and built to give users choice. The tools that work to keep users in the dark are serving someone else's interests.
- mahmoudimus 1y agoCursor does. It tells you how many tokens right above the chat box in the upper right hand corner.
- lunalabs 1y agohow many requests do you get per 5 hour window?
- 1y ago
- submeta 1y agoI moved to Claude Code, Ghostty, Tmux and NeoVim. Very happy with my setup. Not because of Cursor‘s pricing, but because in the end Claude Code is unmatched.
- eknkc 1y agoI seem to like cursor agent with sonnet. Or even copilot agent with sonnet. The editor integrated agent feels better. For example they can react to in editor linter errors without running a lint command etc.
- niux 1y agoClaude Code can also do that if you pair it with the VS Code extension.
- obblekk 1y agoHave people been dropping cursor usage for Claude code? I have dropped to using cursor as just an ide with auto complete. Curious if others are doing this too.
- matt3210 1y agoAuto complete isn’t an AI thing
- hn_throw2025 1y agoCursor’s autocomplete is SuperMaven (which they acquired). From the site : “Supermaven uses Babble, a proprietary language model specifically optimized for inline code completion. Our in-house models and serving infrastructure allow us to provide the fastest completions and the longest context window of any copilot.”
- avianlyric 1y agoLLMs are literally auto-complete models. I just so happens that when your auto-complete model gets big enough, and you poke it in the right way, it accidentally pretends to be intelligent. And it turns out, that pretending to be intelligent is almost as useful as actually being intelligent.
- ipnon 1y agoClaude Code makes me feel like I'm dispatching a legit engineer to go get something done. But they come back in a minute instead of a week. Most of the time the solution gets the job done. Sometimes it introduces too much complexity, sometimes it's totally wrong, but it gets the job done. Cursor meanwhile just feels like shortening the (copy editor/paste chat/copy chat/paste editor) loop. For $200/month you can get equivalent value to a team of engineers. Plan accordingly! The stack is no longer safe for employment. You need to move up to manager or move down to metal.
- ducksinhats 1y ago> You need to move up to manager or move down to metal. Why couldn't Claude do a managers job?
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago'We previously described ... as "rate limits", which wasn't an intuitive way to describe the limit. It is a usage credit pool' Very strange that they decided to describe monthly credits as rate limits, and then spin it as 'unintuitive'. Feels like someone is trying to pull a fast one.
- eru 1y agoWell, rate limits take a moving window of time (say, one second) and check how many requests you make during that time, and throttle you, if necessary. Cursor just makes that window one month long. Technically, that's a rate limit. But yeah, only technically.
- tom_m 1y agoConfusing pricing models generally don't tend to do well.
- hemmert 1y agoI recently started getting the feeling that they also make their workflows way more inefficient for me: their models started to always ask "do you want me to make that change for you", before they made the edits and I would simply reject them if they were not what I needed.
- martin-adams 1y agoI noticed that as well so fixed it out of auto mode and onto the Claude 4 Sonnet 4. It takes longer but gives a better results. I also saw that it was 0.8x the ‘credit cost’ thinking still that I had 500. Now to learn that the 500 has gone and you get unlimited only on auto shows how easy it has been to misunderstand what they’re trying to say. Also, I’ve no idea how to find out the cost of MAX. Especially as their web agent has the text MAX next to the selected non-max model.
- deepdarkforest 1y agoCursor raised 900M, are losing market share to claude code(resorting to poaching 2 leads from there [1]), AND they're decreasing the value of their product? Huge red flag. They should be able to burn cash like no tomorrow. Also, the PR language on this post, and the timing(midnight on a US holiday) is not ideal. This news coupled with google raising the new gemini flash cost by 5x, azure dropping their startup credits, and 2-3 others(papers showing RL has also hit a wall for distilling or improving models), are now solid signals that despite what Sam altman says, intelligence will NOT be soon too cheap to meter. I think we are starting to see the squeeze from the big players. Interesting. I wonder how many startups are betting on models becoming 5-10x cheaper for their business models. If on device models don't get good, I bet a lot of them are in big trouble [1] https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/anysphere-hires-anthropics-claude-code-leaders-amid-ai-talent-race--the-information-93CH-4119909 https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/anysphere-hires-...
- exclipy 1y agoWhat happened to wafer inference hardware like Cerebras? Why isn't Claude being served from that if it's so much faster and energy efficient?
- totaa 1y agoCurrently Cerebras, although faster, is more expensive than the traditional alternatives. Cursor's use case doesn't benefit from instant, users are happy to wait the few seconds (and watching the magic may even be beneficial)
- niux 1y agoHow is it more expensive?
- recursivecaveat 1y agoFancy hardware with bespoke production process, smaller economies of scale, utilization probably not that great since they are user-speed positioning and purportedly under-invested in their compiler, which has a hard job compiling for such an arch anyways. Ignoring for the moment the cost for their bespoke software stack, which they can probably amortize away eventually.
- exclipy 1y agoThat adage that "this is the worst it'll ever be" when people espouse AI coding agents is looking a bit shoddy. No, costs don't inevitably go down when you're on a sweetheart deal.
- willseth 1y agoThe Uber effect.
- mrklol 1y agoJust switch to amp code, their agent is superior in every way. With their tooling you achieve even more although they are using the same models. https://ampcode.com https://ampcode.com
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tom_m 1y agoOr any other open source solution. They're all going to be the same or better. Cursor is cooked. Trying to compete with open source lol. They should study the thing they're so dependent on - VS Code. A history lesson in how VS Code came to be would be good for them.
- mellosouls 1y agoNB. For the time-being at least, you can OPT OUT of the new pricing on the Settings Menu in Advanced Settings. Cursor deserve the criticism, but its been pretty obvious since they introduced the new Ultra plan that we were going to see classic enshittification on the formerly premium options. Very frustrating for long term supporters especially. Note that although this update apologises for the miscommunication (which looks more like deliberate obfuscation), the only option for getting what we paid for (I'm on the annual plan) is the menu setting above, which should be default on!
- hemmert 1y agoWhere exactly is the opt out?
- mellosouls 1y agohttps://cursor.com/dashboard?tab=settings https://cursor.com/dashboard?tab=settings > Advanced Account Settings > Opt Out of New Pricing
- mellosouls 1y agoOption has now been removed.
- primitivesuave 1y agoFor me personally, I only care about the tab autocomplete. If that's a feature I have unlimited access to, I will happily pay $20/month for 10x productivity.
- hn_throw2025 1y agoIt is. Tab is always included.
- zyngaro 1y ago"We’re improving how we communicate future pricing changes" like clearly and explicitly stating what your customers are paying for ? What kind of BS is this ?
- tom_m 1y agoAs the kids say, Cursor is cooked.
- alpineman 1y agoThis is what you get when YC is full of 22-year olds founding companies. Great ideas and fast execution but absolutely no clue when it comes to running a company. Twitter VCs won't repent, once again.