Why Cursor is a great company

·2 min read
aiproduct-managementpot-of-honey

I think Cursor is eating the entire SDLC, and nobody's paying attention.

This post examines why Cursor represents a significant advancement in software development tooling, focusing on business model, market adoption, and operational excellence rather than technical capabilities.

Pricing Model

Cursor's tiered pricing strategy is designed for maximum adoption: Free (Hobby), Pro ($20/month), Ultra ($200/month with ~20× Pro's usage pool), and Teams ($40/user/month). The Pro plan includes a $20 monthly credit pool for model usage plus unlimited Auto completions.

The credit pool mechanism is genius. Instead of hard request limits, Cursor charges model API pricing plus 20% margin. When developers exceed their pool, they pay overages. For larger enterprises on Teams plans, this creates substantial incremental revenue beyond base subscriptions.

Market Expansion

Cursor is expanding beyond developer-only usage into adjacent business functions. Product teams, QA, business analysts, and HR departments increasingly use the platform to create specifications, generate test cases, build dashboards, and manage data pipelines within a unified interface.

This is where it gets interesting. When your PM is writing specs in Cursor, your QA is generating test cases in Cursor, and your analyst is building dashboards in Cursor - you're not just selling to engineering anymore.

Model Flexibility

Unlike competitors locked into single providers, Cursor offers access to leading models: Claude 3.5/3.7/4 Sonnet, GPT-4o/GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash, o3-mini, and DeepSeek models. Teams can choose the optimal model for each task.

This matters more than people realize. When Claude excels at refactoring but GPT handles boilerplate better, having both in one tool eliminates context switching and maximizes developer productivity.

Support Quality

The customer support responsiveness and knowledgeable enterprise account management is exceptional. This sounds boring but it's actually critical for enterprise adoption.

Acknowledged Limitations

  • Official MCP marketplace with verified servers needed
  • Open VSX as extension source is questionable

Conclusion

Despite minor issues, Cursor democratizes AI-powered development workflows for enterprises and independent developers alike. They're building a platform that captures the entire software development workflow, and they're doing it while everyone else is still arguing about whether AI can replace developers.

It can't. But Cursor can make developers 10x more productive, and that's the game.