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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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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.
“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.
A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.
So no it’s not an oxymoron.
Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
Until you learn what productivity is we can’t continue the conversation.
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API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.