Estimation question
Estimate Cursor's monthly LLM API cost per Pro user.
- Cursor
- Estimation
- Hard
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What this question tests
Estimation skill applied to LLM unit economics, including reasonable assumptions about usage volume and token pricing.
How to approach it
- State the goal: estimate monthly LLM API spend Cursor incurs to serve one Pro subscriber.
- Assume a usage pattern, for example a Pro user runs 30 working days a month with around 50 AI requests (autocomplete plus chat) per day.
- Assume average tokens per request, say 2,000 input tokens (code context) and 500 output tokens, since context windows for code can be large.
- Apply an illustrative blended API price, for example roughly 3 dollars per million input tokens and 15 dollars per million output tokens for a mid-tier model, clearly marked as an assumption.
- Compute: 50 requests/day times 30 days equals 1,500 requests/month; total input tokens about 3 million, output tokens about 0.75 million.
- Multiply out: (3M/1M times $3) + (0.75M/1M times $15) equals roughly $9 plus $11, about $20 per user per month, and compare to the known Pro price point.
What a strong answer includes
- States every assumption clearly as an assumption, not a fact, especially token pricing which changes often.
- Uses a sensible request volume tied to an actual workday, not an arbitrary round number.
- Sanity-checks the result against Cursor's actual subscription price to see if margins look plausible.
- Considers that heavy users (the top 10 percent) likely cost far more, and flags usage caps as the actual lever.
- Shows the math step by step rather than jumping to a final number.
Common mistakes
- Not stating assumptions clearly, making the number unverifiable.
- Ignoring that different models (fast autocomplete vs. deep reasoning) have very different costs.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this change for a power user in the top 10 percent of usage?
- How would you reduce this cost without hurting quality?
- How sensitive is this to model provider pricing changes?
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More questions from Cursor
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop