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Comment by retornam | Hacker News Reader

$400M in real revenue versus $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) are totally different things. Real revenue is money actually earned, while ARR just multiplies one month's subscription revenue ($25M) by 12, ignoring customer churn.

Startups love flashing ARR figures because "$300M ARR" sounds impressive, but without knowing churn rates, they might never actually collect that full amount.

JetBrains however collected real $400M in a year.

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I don't think that distinction changes how much each of them is worth relatively to each other.

Achieving $300M ARR in 1 year is extremely extremely impressive regardless of churn or any other metrics really (assuming reasonable numbers). Being valued at $9B because of it doesn't seem out of line.

I'm skeptical of Cursor and not using Cursor myself. I actually use IntelliJ because I write Java.

Cursor's valuation is not unreasonable. But somehow you phrase it like $9B valuation for the fastest growing company that achieves the highest revenue per employee in the history of modern civilization is out of whack somehow.

Unless you have reason to believe the revenue is declining in recent months or will decline in near future, ARR is a better metric. last year real revenue made sense only for low growth companies.

The entire reason OpenAI has a high valuation is the expectation that AI will get a lot better in the next few years. If that happens, building a clone of Cursor/windsurf should be trivial. The only reason you would buy windsurf today is to either pump up the bubble OR use it to increase your market share of developers by taking users away from claude

Cursor just lost access to the extension marketplace and key proprietary plugins that they were using against Microsoft's terms, Windsurf has been eating a chunk of their mindshare, and Copilot is catching up.

That's three good reasons to believe that lots of people will be cancelling in the next months unless something changes.

I’m spending more on Cursor every month. Worth every penny. I’ve never given a dime to Jetbrains.

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