Hacker News

A Postmortem of a Startup

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:39am

Article URL: https://buildwithtract.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703682

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ask HN: How does Cursor make money? Please ELI5

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:38am

Cursor's Pro plan offers 500 "fast" GPT-4 level requests + unlimited "slow" requests for $20/month. I'm struggling to see how this is sustainable given LLM API costs.

A rough estimate for just the 500 fast requests:

Assume ~1,200 tokens/request (modest input/output). Total: 500 * 1,200 = 600,000 tokens/month.

Using even cheaper modern models like GPT-4o (~5/15 per M tokens), this is ~5/month. Using older GPT-4 models (30/60 per M) would push costs well over 20.

This basic calculation doesn't include: The cost of unlimited slow requests, Infrastructure, overhead, R&D, Longer context usage typical in coding.

How can Cursor offer this at $20/month? What's the likely strategy here? Seems like the raw API costs alone could easily approach or exceed the subscription fee for many users. What am I missing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703681

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

The Poser Manifesto

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:35am
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: A free tool for generating sprint name ideas

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:29am

I just wanted to share this free tool that I've made that will generate you sprint name ideas based off of an input. It's been a fun little ceremony our team enjoys. Generating a name at the start. Worth a couple of laughs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703637

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

Bloom Filters

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 5:26am
Categories: Hacker News

Pages