$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.

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.

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.

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

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

I feel jetbrains is squandering an opportunity here. Cursor is significantly easier to build then any IDE in the jetbrains ecosystem. The technology jetbrains is very hard to replicate. While the technology cursor uses should be trivial to replicate.

If jetbrains can combine there IDE technology with cursor technology, that would be ideal.

I think the problem is jetbrains tech is sort of already very biased in a certain direction and it's hard for them to pivot as fast into this new AI direction.

JetBrains launched their cursor competitor a few weeks ago.

I prefer Claude Code still because it has access to more tools - Junie seems unable to fetch URLs and do other things. But that's a tiny gap that JetBrains can close quickly, and the Junie UI is quite pretty. Plus, inside the IDE they can equip the model with far more advanced tools than Claude Code will have from the CLI: inside Code Claude has to explore the codebase by banging stones together with ripgrep, whereas in the IDE it can be equipped with tools to access the indexes and navigate around like a human would.

In theory, JetBrains should be able to compete very strongly in this market. Their single line completion model is already excellent.

I trust Jetbrains. Only company I really trust. They work for me, and have showed it again and again.

They literally have that it is called Junie and after comparing cursor to it we settled for Junie as it does a good job with rust unlike cursor.

> If jetbrains can combine there IDE technology with cursor technology, that would be ideal.

Just give them some time, they're not stupid. I'd drop Cursor in an instant once JetBrains catches up, because IntelliJ IDEs are just a way more powerful.

Didnt Jetbrains launch their AI last year, is anyone using it?

They're giving out 1 month free if you're paying for their IDEs already. I've tried it last year and it was very limited, not "agentic". Now they've launched an agentic version called Junie and also gave another 1 month free, and I've tried it again.

It's a nice improvement over the last edition, but still quite not "smart" as Cursor or Windsurf. The agent seems too shortsighted compared to competitors: it may stop looking for files or making edits sooner and you're left with code made with incomplete context (that does not work or just doesn't address your needs). It also does not fix linter/compiler errors from its own output code before finishing, unlike Cursor.

Try out Junie