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by adityamwagh 75 days ago
How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.
2 comments

Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?
It's pay-as-you-go after a certain number of included requests/tokens: https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
I think enterprise users have a API for the whole company do pay as you go? I believe that’s where they make the most money.
Nope. Enterprise you pay for seat to access all of the enterprise features and then you just pay for tokens as you go. Vast majority of their actual revenue comes from enterprise and their revenue is just api pass through to the model providers.
Does Cursor make money from tokens?

I thought it was primarily a user of Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, so the fewer tokens you use to accomplish a task, the higher their margin.

Gemini is featured just as prominently, and they've most recently been pushing their own model series (Composer).