from Hacker News

Why Cursor's flat-fee pricing could lead to its downfall

by sytse on 4/4/25, 1:19 PM with 2 comments

• by bigyabai on 4/4/25, 1:20 PM

  > Cline/OpenRouter’s monetization model is simple: Add a 5% markup on top of anything you pay your API provider.

  If you read this and think "Oh, nice business!" then you are exactly the reason why DevOps is a specialized role that we don't assign to developers.

• by al2o3cr on 4/4/25, 2:32 PM

  Speaking of "incentive alignment", what's the incentive for providers using the "cost plus" billing model to reduce hallucinations / bogus outputs?

  Seems like they're pushed in the same enshittified direction that search has been, where it's optimized to increase traffic rather than produce answers efficiently.