This is true but Cursor’s problems are a bit worse than a normal paywalled service.

Cursor allows users to get free credits without a credit card and this forced them to change their VSCode fork on how it handles identification so they can stop users from spawning new accounts.

Another is that normally, companies have a cost for each free user. For Cursor, this cost is so sporadic since it doesn’t charge per million context, they use credits. Free users get 50 credits but 1 credit could be 200k+ context each so it could be $40-50 per free user per month. And these users get 50 credits every month.

Lastly, the cursor vip free repo has trended on GitHub many times and users who do pay might stop and use this repo instead.

The Cursor vip free creator is well within his rights to do what they want and get “free” access. This unfortunately hurts paying customers since Cursor has to stop these “hacks.”

This is why Cursor should just move to a VSCode extension. I’ve used Augment and other VSCode extensions and the feature set is close to Cursor so it’s possible for them just to be an extension. The other would be to remove free accounts but allow users to bring their own keys. To use Composer/Agent, you can’t bring your own keys.

This will allow Cursor to stop maintaining a VSCode fork, helps them stop caring if users create new accounts (since all users are paying) and lets users bring their own keys if they don’t want to pay. Hell, if they charge a lifetime fee to bring our own keys for Agent, that would bring in revenue too. But as I see now, Roo and Cline’s agent features are catching up and Cursor won’t have a moat soon.