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It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the
by redox99 1mo ago
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans.
Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
- alansaber 1mo agoToken reselling stops working when providers literally won't work with you
- echelon 1mo agoAlternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.
- redox99 1mo agoCodex sub is way cheaper than equally strong models on openrouter.
- nab 1mo agoAgreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term. Big reason we built https://boxes.dev https://boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
- repeekad 1mo agoSurely the days of being able to “bring your own subscription” to a third party platform are also numbered?
- nab 1mo agoI’m not so sure… Claude backtracked on this when they tried it
- DANmode 1mo agoThey played pigeon on discless videogame consoles a time or two, too. How long have you been in tech, outta curiosity? Edit: great answer.
- Dylan16807 1mo ago> Edit: great answer. What do you mean by that? If you're being sassy about a downvote then I'll remind you that when you reply to a comment, that person can't downvote your reply. Also this is an account with barely any comments or points, I'm pretty sure they can't downvote at all.
- DANmode 1mo agoI’ll remind the reader if they downvote without mentioning why, there’s no opinion really being conveyed. Just a stub of a conversation. I don’t care about the points. Just the chat, which seems finished.
- Dylan16807 1mo agoSure, no opinion really being conveyed. But it didn't come from the person you were talking to, so editing on a sarcastic "great answer" doesn't really work. The person you were talking to just hadn't responded within the first hour. They still might.
- DANmode 1mo agoIf “community outreach” or “marketing” happens to reappear on their agent’s to-do list, then maybe!
- 1mo ago
- xtracto 1mo agoI just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
- itake 1mo agoWhat about openrouter though?
- dancemethis 1mo agoI will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with. Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
- dakolli 1mo agoCouldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality? I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
- raincole 1mo agoYou can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
- natdempk 1mo agoCursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate
- sourcecodeplz 1mo agoNo. Its is not for bring your own key. It is for 3rd party models (which you get double the amount of your sub price as usage). Of course they wont charge you extra for BYOK. how would they???
- ch_sm 1mo agoTo be fair, that is what it says on their website.
- natdempk 1mo agoThey do for Teams and Enterprise plans BYOK: > On Teams and Enterprise plans, third-party model requests include a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens. This rate applies on top of model API pricing for included usage, on-demand usage, and BYOK usage. See the link I posted above or also this one: https://cursor.com/help/models-and-usage/token-rate https://cursor.com/help/models-and-usage/token-rate
- aspirin 1mo agoEnterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.
- oh_no 1mo agocursor adds $0.25/M to your token bill for 3rd party services. sounds small but it's insanely big on cached inputs, which are an insanely high % of use
- raincole 1mo agoI've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.
- girvo 1mo agoCursor has a surprising amount of inertia, though, at least where I work.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo agoI've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it. I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful. For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.
- ifwinterco 1mo agoClaude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck. In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market. For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come. The cursor model is quite nice because it allows you to switch between cheap and expensive models for different tasks
- pkulak 1mo agoI think the point is that CC was the first general use, terminal based harness. I think. Now you can use PI, or OpenCode, or whatever, and use any model you like. Now, I’m no expert, because I was late to the game and have only ever used Pi. But I guess Cursor is some product that’s tied to your IDE? If so, then yeah. That’s just too restrictive. I still love my IDE, but I don’t want it to be my harness too.
- 1mo ago
- mirzap 1mo agoWhy do people keep insisting that subscription plans are subsidized? They are not. API prices are outrageous, designed to milk enterprise users. They probably have an 80-90% profit margin on subscription plans. Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spec to models from large labs.
- sunaurus 1mo agoTo provide inference, Anthropic and OpenAI need to also constantly spend resources on training new models. If either one of them stops doing that, customers will stop using them, because other models will become better. In other words, there is no point in talking about inference cost in isolation.
- citrin_ru 1mo agoOpenAI leaked financial data (2025) suggests this - it has $5.7 billion for marketing which 44% of revenue. It’s hard to explain where these billions go other than into subsidised subscription plans and a free tier.
- owebmaster 1mo ago> Inference is cheap; When they outsource training to China they will be so profitable!
- redox99 1mo agoBecause using chinese models on OpenRouter is way more expensive than the equivalent codex sub, unless you use something clearly inferior like deepseek flash.
- qaq 1mo agoUse cursor cli for grok pretty happy with it.
- dbbk 1mo agoWell yeah, hence why they started making their own
- prophesi 1mo agoHonestly, Cursor's AI harness worked best with the Anthropic models. Could just be my bias though. Evaluating frontier LLM's all seem to be by vibes. I think the industry is understanding it's both the harness and the model that makes the difference; can't half ass either, and some harnesses do better with different models. I'm good to leave this "career." Senior software engineers, make your bag.
- DustinBrett 1mo agoLot of people will to spend that much. Works quite well, very useful.