It is what it is

Why Cursor is a great company

In this post, I will not discuss what Cursor is and how it works (assuming you know this already) and will just share some of my thoughts about why I think it is awesome.

Important NB: I am not a developer and although I have “written” several hundreds of thousands lines of code with the help of AI both at my work and for personal projects, I never worked officially as SDE, so take the musing below with a grain of salt.

Pricing model

Cursor has a great pricing model. For most developers, it starts from a trial period and they can get a preview of what’s possible for only $20/month. It will not be enough for serious work, and soon users will have to switch to $60/$200 plans with extra spend and they will be happy about it.

Cheap subscriptions are great for enterprise adoption too. In many companies developers tried Cursor in personal capacity and then asked management to get Cursor for their teams. What happens next? Companies opt for the $60/month/user for enterprise plan and then there is an extra spend factor. When you are done with allotted 1000 requests per month you start spending real money. Developers will not switch back to Auto mode and use claude-3.5 for their important work tasks, despite efforts from other labs, everyone is still using claude 4 family or in some cases, gemini 2.5 pro.

Extra spending can go into hundreds of dollars per user per month and a typical enterprise that started with 100 users at $40/month (40 * 100 * 12 = $48k annual contract) often ends up with more users (everyone loves Cursor) at $60/month + extra (60 * 200 * 12 + at least $10K/month of extra spend - $264k) - rare case when a company is happy to pay more to a vendor.

There is no way back from here. No one will go back to writing boilerplate from scratch anymore and Cursor and the likes are here to stay.

Cursor is eating SDLC

From what I observe, Cursor is slowly creeping in adjacent functions. Not only developers are using Cursor now, but business analysts, QA, product, HR and so on are starting to use this tool a lot.

Yes, the look and feel of the IDE may be slightly intimidating at first for non-tech folks, but as soon as they receive training, they can jump right into action and:

, all within one tool. Native support for MCP servers allows it to connect to business systems and orchestrate all parts of the SDLC from Cursor.

Models access

A huge number of people, even those working in tech roles, know about AI from using a free version of ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot and are usually not exactly enthusiastic about what it can do for this exact reason.

When company provides them with an enterprise license of Cursor, they instantly get access to the SOTA models and they change their opinion almost instantly. Cursor’s independence allows it to provide access to the best models from all labs in one place.

Developers can code with sonnet4, data analytics can use gemini for wrangling large datasets (thanks to the huge context window of the models), analysts can use o3 for research and product managers can draft product specs with reasonably good gpt-4o.

No other tool provides this level of flexibility and convenience.

Support

This is a relatively minor one, but I don’t know how they manage to do this. All my questions, complaints and feature requests sent to hi@cursor.com have been answered within couple of hours max. Knowing how hard it is to set up a functioning customer support systems and provide human-powered support, I can only salute Cursor’s head of support.

Their account managers that help enterprise are also one of the best I’ve seen. Prompt, knowledgeable and ready to jump on a call, just like it should be (hey David).

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If it sounds like I am a Cursor fanboy, maybe it is because I am.

Obviously it has problems. Official MCP marketplace with verified and vetted servers will be great. Open VSX as an extensions source is a questionable choice.

But overall Cursor is a great tool that opens a lot of opportunities to a lot of people and will bring immense value to both enterprises and indie developers.