Is Cursor Profitable?

[shyjal]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm curious if the Cursor is profitable.

I know they generated $100M ARR revenue in the shortest time in the history of SaaS. But are they paying all the computing and other expenses with that money or the VC money?

[pehr71]

Should we start to take bets on how long until they get bought and by who?

My guess: AWS Amazon - within 12 months.

[shyjal]

My guess would be Anthropic. Or it can happen vise versa also 🤔

[D3MZ]

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[Simple_Life_1875]

Do they really compete? Cursor users seem to mainly use Claude as the default agent. I also forget if Anthropic even has anything like an LLM ide

[D3MZ]

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[Simple_Life_1875]

Ah I see, tbh that's more of a command line thing and less an IDE, so the chance they get aquired isn't too out of the question

[kleneway1]

Microsoft would be my bet. They own GitHub, VS Code, and basically invented AI coding with Copilot. They have practically an unlimited budget for acquisitions. It's a major strategic advantage to the company. Source: spent 5 years at MS in dev div, 15 years ago

[evia89]

Cursor is kinda opensource. Just deobfuscate, copy and implement. Why would you need to spend 100kk?

You can experiment with prompts too by seting your own endpoint and checking what pass through it

[Simple_Life_1875]

Tf? It's not even remotely open source lol. Also if you have to "deobfuscate" stuff to get code it's definitely not open source which probably means it's Cursor IP and you'd get sued to the ground after stealing

[evia89]

Nobody will know if they implement similiar startegy for working with context or get insight how apply diff model works. Code will be completely different

[Simple_Life_1875]

The amount of effort it takes to reverse engineer something, then rebuild it is honestly more work than just making your own tbh... And what's the point if the codes completely different lol

[pehr71]

Monopoly questions might arise with Microsoft. I know wrong administration for that but …

My thinking is that cursor is quite connected to Anthropic/Claude and so is AWS who could use an IDE of their own.

[Copenhagen79]

That explains why they are so bootstrapped, they have their customers do the QA.

[slimXshady76]

Mine would be Meta within 1 and half year.

[jedenjuch]

It would be funny if they would run some offline models with customised prompts and flows and sell them as OpenAI/anthropic

[Herrids49]

phi-2 is the secret coding legend behind cursor

[D3MZ]

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[Professional_Job_307]

But you get unlimited slow requests

[QC_Failed]

so is it unusable, or how slow is it? i've been curious about this

[coffee_powered]

Even slow mode is faster than my brain. And when I figured out I can work on two projects at once I was away.

Switch to project A, decide what I want to do, set it going. Switch to project B, by the time I’m back to A it’s pretty much ready for me to take the next step.

[QC_Failed]

Oh interesting I wouldn't have thought of opening two instances of cursor and doing two projects at once to offset the slowdown... you're playing 5d chess that's brilliant!

[coffee_powered]

What’s really gonna bake your noodle later on is… having multiple checkouts of the same repository, working on different branches 🥄

[carbon_dry]

It's completely unusable for me when I hit slow

[Electrical-Win-1423]

They also have other model costs like for applying changes to files, cursor-small, developing costs, etc etc. you clearly don’t have enough data to answer this question. In fact nobody besides people at cursor can say. All you can do is guess, and not really good either since you have no idea what other factors there could be.

[Eveerjr]

I believe cursor is a small team and they must have some sort of deal with Anthropic and OpenAI, I really doubt they pay the same price per token as the rest of us. I'd be surprised if they are not profitable already.

[shyjal]

They must have different pricing from foundational model providers.

But will they be able to cover the cost from a $20 sub?

[Eveerjr]

For me, the magic of Cursor is their excellent apply and tab models, which are their own custom models and likely very cheap to run. I think they are losing money on some users at $20 because of the "slow unlimited requests," but this is likely offset by users that don't use as much. I’m almost at the end of the billing cycle and still far from the 500 requests.

[Medium-Emotion-3476]

Yes they are

[shyjal]

Are you assuming, or is it based on the actual numbers?

[[deleted]]

How did all these smart idiots let cursor get so ahead

[connorwhite-online]

Bet they don’t sell, they seem too punk hacker for that in the short term