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What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins co
by rob74 6mo ago
What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoThey 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 6mo ago> users who haven't caught on yet They are catching up fast! https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-costs-tokens-8090-2026-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...
- altacc 6mo agoTellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..." https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964 https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964 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.
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoCodex is coming for those non coding use cases too. Is Cursor?
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoAPI rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoThey’re not the “real rates”, they’re the rates that are being charged for API use. API reportedly has a margin of profit You also neglect that products like Cursor run on two margins, their own plus the API provider’s. That’s always going to come at a premium
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoYes, the rates with a margin of profit are the real rates. The rates without a margin of profit (or with a negative one) are not real.
- sighthrowaway 6mo ago> users who haven't caught on yet If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.
- echelon 6mo agoWhat do you mean? Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute. If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers. Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.
- sighthrowaway 6mo agoIf you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.
- paganel 6mo ago“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.
- sighthrowaway 6mo agoA 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. So no it’s not an oxymoron.
- SiempreViernes 6mo agoProductivity 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.
- modo_mario 6mo agoWhat's the advantage over github copilot actually? They seem to have all the same access and features (except for this sheduling thing?) for cheaper.
- zozbot234 6mo agoAPI 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.
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoBut 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.
- dtagames 6mo agoWhose 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.
- ozim 6mo agoIn terms of IDE yeah it is not that great. I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor. I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops. They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.
- sigmoid10 6mo agoCynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
- zozbot234 6mo agoIsn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.
- mobiuscog 6mo agoIt can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice. If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience. It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.
- unknownx113 6mo agomac studio 512gb versions are entirely sold out for this reason precisely
- villgax 6mo ago* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoMS is doing just fine I'm sure
- oulipo2 6mo agoCursor is useless
- ymolodtsov 6mo agoTheir revenue and growth justified it. Plus, for xAI that could be the only way to get a SOTA coding model they want so hard.
- singularity2001 6mo agoI thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?
- freedomben 6mo agoThat matches my anecdatal experience with a couple dozen devs. Many wnet hard on the Cursor train and have mostly gotten off now with CC and Codex TUIs available
- user34283 6mo agoAre TUIs not yesterday’s hot thing? The way I work now in the Codex desktop app is that I spin up 3-5 conversations which work in their dedicated git worktree. So while the agent works and runs the test suite I can come back to other conversations to address blockers or do verification. Important is that I can see which conversation has an update and getting desktop notifications. Maybe I could set this up with tabs in the Terminal, but it does not sound like the best UX.
- unknownx113 6mo agoThat's probably more a personal preference than objective measurement. A lot of people already spent most of their dev time in the terminal, so for someone like myself that uses neovim claude code or codex cli are much easier than using the GUIs.
- dmix 6mo agoThe solution is use both. They both have their usecases. Cursor's autocomplete and quickly highlight a few lines -> throw into context, plus it's got a very good file index/API (which burns much less tokens than Claude's grep'ing) and whatever else they are doing underneath to optimize it for coding. Claude is still gold standard if you're not in an IDE though.
- dubeye 6mo agoBecause of user count? Same was said about instagram. with all due respect, devs don't seem to understand business
- alvis 6mo agoWho are the users? I haven't seen many pro users using cursor
- i_think_so 6mo agoBut do devs know a which IDE is better? That seems to be a rather important question here.
- dubeye 6mo agoIt's not 'the' most important question.
- jcelerier 6mo agoOr devs are just different users who care about different things and have different experiences. Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account. Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).
- alvis 6mo agocan't X recreate one with 1B? As an IDE, honestly I can't even understand it needs more than 1M to create
- Chrisszz 6mo agoIt's not about the tech, it's about the pool of users that use Cursor, by acquiring Cursor you get a bunch of users + subscribed and already paying pool of people instead of just rebuilding something from scratch and convincing people to change their tools with a new one
- RyanHamilton 6mo agoIs it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.
- Chrisszz 6mo agoTrue, especially with Composer (the finetuned model by cursor)
- CryptoBanker 6mo agoCursor sells its own models as well now
- tietjens 6mo agoIt's own RT'ed open source models right?
- ludicrousdispla 6mo agoAI yielding such incredible cost savings. /s
- elAhmo 6mo ago> that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains Massive understatement calling it "a not particularly good plugin". If it were that simple there wouldn't be a need to even do this.
- astrashe2 6mo agoGeneral Motors is worth $72B.
- ultratalk 6mo agoThat feels more like a reflection of how terrible most GM cars are than about the inflated valuation of Cursor, which is what I infer you were trying to imply.
- StingSS 6mo agoWelcome to the era of vibe-based valuations
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nguyentranvu 6mo ago> What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B... yes. plus $2b ARR, 1m DAU
- s08148692 6mo agothe IDE has little value What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models 60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend
- xnx 6mo agoHow massive is the Cursor user base?
- mrweasel 6mo agoThe numbers I could find says 1 million, with about 35% paying. I'd say that a million users is pretty good, but 350.000 paying users isn't, if you're a $60B company. Someone else mentioned that Anysphere has a $1B ARR, but I seriously doubt that each user is forking over ~$3000 per year.
- jmalicki 6mo agoOver $2B ARR now. Why do you doubt $3k/yr? Corporate usage skews a lot higher, when it's evaluated against hiring, not as a nice to have addon. If $10k/yr means you get work done with one less hire that's an easy decision.
- unknownx113 6mo agoenterprise contracts. ARR is almost definitely juiced by counting future contract value
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 6mo ago>and the Composer models You mean Kimi K2.5? They can get that for free.
- 6mo ago