Comment by redox99
4 hours ago
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans.
Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.
Cursor has a surprising amount of inertia, though, at least where I work.
Enterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.
What about openrouter though?
I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with.
Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
If the Opus/Fable harness is superior and it's written using Opus/Fable then it will cease to be a moat. Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality?
I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
Cursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate
You can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
I just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review
Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
Alternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.
Agreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term.
Big reason we built https://boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
Surely the days of being able to “bring your own subscription” to a third party platform are also numbered?
On one hand, yes, it doesn't make sense to give out subsidized tokens forever.
On the other hand, subscriptions create lock-in in a way that API pricing doesn't.
I think a more likely end is that subscription value decreases over time because API pricing gets more reasonable, but subscriptions stay because they are a good way of getting money out of people consistently.
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I’m not so sure… Claude backtracked on this when they tried it
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