Comment by hobofan
15 hours ago
What surprises me is just how much they've missed the mark.
I'm not an extreme user of Cursor. It has become an essential part of my workflow, but I also probably on the lower/medium section of users. I know that a lot of my friends were spending $XXX amounts/month on extra usage with them, while I've never gone beyond 50% included premium credits usage.
After their changes I'm getting hit with throttling multiple times a day, which likely means that the same thing happens to almost every Cursor user. So that means one or more of:
- They are jacking up the prices, to squeeze out more profit, so it looks good in the VC game
- They had to jack up the prices, so that they aren't running at a loss anymore (that would be a bad indicator regarding profitability for the whole field)
- They are really incompetent about simulating/estimating the impact of their pricing decisions, which also isn't a good future indicator for their customers
My guess is that it's your second scenario there (avoid running at a loss). In the start-up game scale/growth is the most important thing and profits really aren't that important. you want to show to later stage VCs that your idea has traction and there's a large addressable market.
Whilst profits aren't important you also can't burn all your current capital, so if the burn rate gets too high you have to put up prices, which seems likely to be what Cursor is doing.