Comment by andsoitis
2 months ago
> How is a VSCode fork and a open weight LLM fine-tune worth $60B?
Ignoring future business ideas, Cursor reported reached $2 billion+ annualized revenue run rate in 2026, doubling from 2025. Recent financing rounds reached high-end valuation between $30 billion and $50 billion.
Revenue without expenses is meaningless. Annualized revenue is even worse. It's like a gambler bragging that they spin through $20,000 a month. Yeah, but for how long?
If you give me a billion, I can do an annualized revenue run rate of ~$12 billion just by selling a dollar for 99 cents.
As the old joke goes:
We're losing money on every unit, but we'll make up for it in volume.
“annualized revenue run rate” is a bogus accounting term. It’s like taking a paycheck and multiplying it by 365. Notice the complete lack of any mention of profits.
Taking my paycheck and multiplying would be an excellent measure of my yearly salary. I don't understand how that analogy is meant to imply that the approach is nonsensical.
because your paycheck comes only one day per month, so that estimate would bee too high by a factor of 30
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they pick some month with the higest revenue. Unlike your income, a business makes different amounts each month based on some trends and many other factors, and they can varry wildly.
Its your most recent months revenue * 12, its not that deep bro LMAO
a lot of companies I know are cancelling Cursor in favor of Claude Code or Codex
because they already have VSCode or IntelliJ for edits
A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates.
Codex is still going strong but it’s hard to imagine they won’t do similar eventually.
So now im honestly hearing a lot more folk stick it out with cursor while waiting for the dust to settle.
>A lot of enterprises were doing that but now they hit the 150 user limit on Claude and are paying seat+api rates.
A lot of enterprises use Github Copilot which has per-request pricing model which effectively means unlimited tokens which eliminates this issue.
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yeah i just canceled my cursor sub and switched back to vscode. work pays for my claude max sub, no point paying for cursor anymore when i can just use openrouter every few months to test other models if i want
I did that then I switched back to Cursor after Claude kept running out immediately. Now I pay for both.
Cursor also has a very nice integrated DX that I miss in Claude's VSCode plugin.
I'm seeing the same thing, probably all will land in a combination of Antigravity Inbox experience, Devin and some OpenClaw omnipresence style UX.
I mean the best argument I see for cursor is that you can easily switch between AIs, which is convenient since they seem to run at 80-90% up time (with those 10-20% clustered at West coast working hours). But the big AI companies are likely to keep an edge over Open-source fine-tunes and they are able to subsidize the coding agents in a way Cursor can't.
I expect Cursor passes nearly every cent it collects on to Anthropic and OpenAI
So migrating them to a friendly x.ai pricing will bump profit margins.
At the expense of a worse product that will cause everyone to jump ship to something like Threads in the long-term, but sure...
Even more than that possibly. I don't imagine cursor has any deals in place with Anthropic. They likely pay API pricing like everyone else.
To add to this, Cursor provides a high value go to market strategy for X.AI's modeling efforts. Cursor's own modeling efforts would require an extreme investment of capital to compete. Capital which X.AI has already spent or is planning to spend.
I don't think we can use normal valuation methods for these AI companies.
Things are moving so fast, and these companies have no moat whatsoever. Purchasing a company for 30x annual revenue (and as others have pointed out, how much of this revenue goes straight to companies like Anthropic?), without knowing if it's even going to exist in 3-5 years, seems bonkers.
I mean, congratulations to the founders on becoming billionaires in record time, but this is uncharted territory.