Cursor died for me when they star putting limits and time waits everywhere even on more expensive plans.
I totally preferred the other way, but at some point , there is boiler plate or organizations you just want done and it does not make sense to put you waiting minutes a time to confirme few refactors.
That literally killed the vibe for cursor to me
(I put it in Gemini for English translation)
The 1080p and most expensive tier is 0.70 USD per second. Since Sora 2 runs at 30 FPS, each second of video costs roughly 2.3c per frame.
While a single 1920x1080 static image is 765 tokens, video models use spacetime compression. Instead of a raw 22,950 tokens per second (765 tokens x 30 frames), a second of 1080p video equates to roughly 10,000 'latent tokens' due to temporal redundancy. Adding 20 tokens per second of audio, we get roughly 10,020 tokens per second of output.
At $0.70 per second for ~10,020 tokens, the cost is approximately $0.00007 per token for Sora 2.
10 seconds of Sora 2 video would cost $7.00 for roughly 100,200 tokens.
In comparison, GPT-5.4-pro at 15 USD per 1M output tokens costs $0.000015 per token. To generate 100,200 tokens of text, it would cost only $1.50.
This puts Sora 2 at roughly 4.6x more expensive than GPT-5.4-pro per token generated. However, if we ignore video compression and treat every frame as a unique 1080p image (765 tokens each), Sora 2 becomes roughly 30x more expensive in terms of raw computational effort per frame
Some friends and I did a "just for fun" calculation on what price AI should really have using some of business and infrastructure experience.
The three of us have a decent amount of years in adjacent fields, still this is more like a "trust me bro comment".
Anyway, we came to a subscription price of 120-150 USD/mo and we did this 6 months ago when the world wasn't yet the chaos it is right now.
If those number had to be adjusted, a quick calculation would put it already close to the 200 USD/mo mark so there a decent margin after taxes.
That said, of we are anywhere close to be correct on this, I think that increase the price of the product by 10x will drastically reduce the number of users which will then drastically reduce the hardware required.
And even if we are off by the double, it would still be a 5x price increase would cause similar effect.
Speculation on my part is that it needs to be cheap because they need as much as human generated content as possible as they are running out of data and the models have plateau'ed. We don't see that thing of models getting 10x smarter anymore and maybe we see they are getting smaller or more specialised.
Ofc, disruptive research might come up, but my guess is that this price is both a incentive and a requirement for this business to not break apart.
your $120-150/month gut feeling is basically where the math lands. $1.30/clip, 100 clips/month, you need $130 just to cover compute. $150 with margin, checks out. Problem is at 10x the price you lose 90%+ of users and the whole growth story is dead. Same thing that happened with ChatGPT Pro at $200/month honestly, barely anyone upgraded.
The slapocalipse is here, but I would propose the idea that open source maintainer get free access to AI tools from these big companies, so at least they can aggregate the problems and have some level of automation of the process.
For me, this seems something that would make sense for all dev community to push for.
If you were to apply the principle of charity[0] to the person you originally asked the question to, who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?
>who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?
It's really not clear, which is why I listed 3 plausible options. I'm also not going to bother attacking an imaginary position and be accused of "strawman" or whatever.
It only holds because (1) people are inclined to accept failures as pain of using something cutting edge and (2) you kinda don't know what is failing anymore.
Extra one
(3) We are getting super lenient with major failures and having a services that has only one 9 on reliability charts as norm.
I totally preferred the other way, but at some point , there is boiler plate or organizations you just want done and it does not make sense to put you waiting minutes a time to confirme few refactors. That literally killed the vibe for cursor to me
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