Comment by wahnfrieden
12 hours ago
They 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.
> users who haven't caught on yet
They are catching up fast!
https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...
Tellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..."
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.
Codex is coming for those non coding use cases too. Is Cursor?
API 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.
But 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.
What's the advantage over github copilot actually? They seem to have all the same access and features (except for this sheduling thing?) for cheaper.
API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
They’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
> 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.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
You have model choice in cursor… why would you use composer?
[dead]
What 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.
If you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.
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