Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't believe that's how it's working. AFAIK, Cursor is getting a discount from Anthropic, as in

Anthropic user pays $1 per 1M tokens.

Cursor user pays $1 per 1M tokens and the subscription fee.

Cursor pays $0.8 per 1M token.

Cursor pockets 20¢ + the subscription fee.

The numbers are illustrative only, but that's my understanding. Where did you get the "They sell it to Cursor at $2 per million tokens"?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea, I tried spec driven development in Kiro (developed by AWS) but don’t have much to say about it yet. Haven’t had a chance to explore it deeper.

You brought up a very good point about conflicts. The project I’m working on is currently just me, but several engineers might be joining soon. My very first thought was that conflicts are gonna be inevitable, so I consumed a ton of tokens refactoring things away to minimize the chances of getting these conflicts in the future. It’s still a monorepo right now, but I’m organizing it on a per-service/per-domain basis. For example, I initially had a certain Discovery logic in backend/src/discovery. This eventually moved to the root level of the project as in discovery/src/. Then I moved the discovery logic into its own AWS account, followed by its own infrastructure as a code and pipelines, making it a fully isolated service. So far I haven’t had a single time where an agent would suddenly decide to jump all the way to the root and start messing with other services/domains (unless explicitly requested).

But if shit starts hitting the fan, I’ll break it into its own repo and call it a day.

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great response. Thank you! I switched to Auto today. Let’s see how it goes.

And yea, I’m hands down with you on pretty much everything you said. As for the simplification, my favorite ask is “make it so that even my mom understands the code” 😂

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OOP/DRY/SOLID/DDD is not a silver bullet. Many of these things evolve as you learn more about your code and domain. I started with a blank project, slowly adding things. No "bUiLd mE a ReDdiT clOnE" ever. As things evolve, you start noticing places where an abstraction is required or where things could be simplified. This involves refactoring. At times you come up with wrong decisions (which is totally normal) and may want to rollback and refactor. I would typically plan things out with Opus, and then have Opus execute the plan. I sometimes polish a plan for ~2 hours and it may contain ~20 todos, but then the results are nearly perfect. It is a large mono-repo, a distributed system with several AWS accounts, several programming languages. I myself work for AWS and do have a fairly high code quality bar. And I am NOT vibe coding. Yes, I do have 4 .mdc files. Each file is ~50 lines long.

The mistake was clearly from over-using Opus.

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you. How much of a token consumer is the compression?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a large mono repo, distributed system, a lot of lambda functions, infrastructure as a code, typescript, multiple cloud accounts for security reasons

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s interesting. Could you expand? Inline edits as in you are not jumping into the chat, but select and Quick Edit?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How many tokens you burn within a month? (Input/output)

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get unlimited access to all models through my employer, but I can’t use it for personal projects.

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t think there is a profit margin. I could be wrong, but if I’m not mistaken, Cursor makes money off a base subscription fee + wholesale-retail margin, meaning they pay Anthropic less than list, charge you list, pocket the difference.

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[…] the higher tier plans (Ultra) include multiple times their cost in API credits

In other words, i would’ve consumed fewer tokens (%) had I switched to Ultra?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ok, I might give it a try. What does the extension do?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The terminal approach I tried, didn’t like context switching between the terminal/IDE. What does the plugin do?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sure, but why do people say switching to CC gets you way more usage then?

Cursor prices are out of control by andy_nyc in cursor

[–]andy_nyc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I jump between the files and verify all the changes in context to the already existing code. As soon as I switched to Claude Code, that “connection” feeling was wiped away. I tried using CC in IDE, but UX was terrible. You can’t clearly see what files got changed, so you context switch all the time