Anthropic released their complete prompt engineering guide. 99% won't read it. I spent 3 days testing every single technique. While you're saying "please" and "thank you" to AI, smart operators are using advanced techniques to 10x their output. Here's how you can do the same:

RT @anothercohen: If I was one of the employees stuck holding the bag at Windsurf, I'd simply vote to shut down the shell company and pay t….

RT @ConnorShowler: SaaS #1: . - $20k invested . - $1,200,000 net profit in 12 months and growing. SaaS #2: . - $7k invested. - $5k net prof….

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Thanks for making it to the end!. I'm Loic - indie hacker, Slow-nomad, and a product tinkerer. Currently building something exciting at ColdIQ (. Previously built &

When a product seems too good to be true, check who's paying for it. Because eventually, the bill comes due. And on June 16th, Cursor decided it was you. Welcome to the end of VC-subsidized AI.

So was Cursor's loss leader strategy genius or disaster?. They got massive growth, sure. But at what cost? User trust is gone. Competitors circling. Burn rate astronomical. Maybe that's just the price of playing the VC game in 2025.

The real tragedy? They built something developers loved. Then economics forced them to destroy that trust overnight. No warning. No transparency. Just sudden caps and surprise bills. The apology came too late.

Cursor raised how much? $900M at a $9.9B valuation. Sounds like a lot? Nope. Not when you're hemorrhaging money on every power user. Not when competitors are going free. They're trapped between growth and survival.

If you ask me, the June 16th "betrayal" was inevitable. You can't lose $40 per user per day forever. My token usage proves it: 1,026,772 tokens in one session. That's $15 instantly gone. Multiply by millions of developers. .

But here's the deal. Everyone's playing this game. Glorified as "Loss Leader Strategy.". Claude Code? Same $200/month for 20x usage. And then Google launched Gemini CLI free. At this point, it's a race to the bottom funded by VC billions. Someone's going to run out of money.

Today, Cursor is bleeding users. "Hero to zero" as one developer aptly put it. Mass exodus to Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf. Trust shattered. Chargebacks filed. All because they couldn't keep eating $50+ per user per day.

Plus this isn't new. Uber lost $2.8B in 2016. Amazon was unprofitable for 20 years. The playbook: Subsidize costs → Dominate market → Raise prices later. Except Cursor users revolted at step 3.

The scale is staggering too. Cursor went from $100M to $500M ARR in 6 months. Fastest SaaS growth ever recorded. But if every user burns money like me, that's potentially billions in losses. The VC subsidy can only last so long.

If you really think about it, Cursor's operating like the Planet Fitness model in reverse. Gyms profit from people who pay but don't show up. Cursor needed users who pay but don't code much. Instead? They got developers burning 5x their subscription value.

Take my actual usage from July 2nd. One coding session: 7.59 MILLION tokens. That's $50-60 in API costs. For ONE session. On my $20/month subscription. I'm literally losing them money every time I open the app.

The CEO later apologised and made one thing clear: Cursor was eating those costs. They were subsidizing MILLIONS in API fees. For free. Every power user was a financial black hole. With Claude 4 at $15/$75 per million tokens, the math was catastrophic.

A few weeks ago, Cursor silently changed from it's plan from "500 requests" to "$20 worth of compute.". Users hit the cap in 20 prompts. Some got surprise charges. Reddit exploded. They called it a "rug pull" and "the great unsubscription.". But here's what nobody understood.

June 16th, 2025: The day a $9.9B startup admitted it couldn't afford its own users. Cursor's community is in full revolt mode. But I just did the math on my usage. Every time I code, I cost them $60. My subscription? $20/mo. Inside the loss leader strategy that finally broke:

Like and RT the first tweet if you found this thread useful. Follow me @LoicReco for more threads on SaaS, Indie Hacking, AI, and all things technology.

Thanks for making it to the end!. I'm Loic - indie hacker, Slow-nomad, and a product tinkerer. Currently building something exciting at ColdIQ (. Previously built &