if you aren’t redlining the LLM, you aren’t headlining
April 9, 2025
There’s something cooked about Windsurf/Cursors’ go-to-market pricing – there’s no way they are turning a profit at $50/month. $50/month gets you a happy meal experience. If you want more power, you gotta ditch snacking at McDonald’s.Going forward, companies should budget $100 USD to $500 USD per day, per dev, on tokens as the new normal for business, which is circa $25k USD (low end) to $50k USD (likely) to $127k USD (highest) per year.
If you don’t have OPEX per dev to do that, it’s time to start making some adjustments…These tools make each engineer within your team at least two times more productive. Don’t take my word for it—here’s a study by Harvard Business School published last week that confirms this.
Source: if you aren’t redlining the LLM, you aren’t headlining
Geoff Huntley has been writing extensively about working with LLMs recently.
He proposes companies should be heavily investing in these tools for their developers.
But as Mark Pesce observed to me in response–perhaps companies should be investing in the hardware themselves, and running their own models?
