Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine).

If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.

I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for me personally.

I totally get that but that’s not really what I asked/am driving at. Though I certainly question how many people are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it’s pretty hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for an AI tool.

I'm curious, how are you accounting this? Does the productivity improvement from Claude's product let you get your work done faster, which buys you more free time? Does it earn you additional income, presumably to the tune of somewhere north of $2k/month?

My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead.

I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf

Again I understand and I don’t doubt you’re getting insane value out of it but if they believed people would spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not generating a profit.

As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation and investment and they need to figure out real quick how they’re going to survive when that money dries up. People are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I don’t think they’ll spend even $10k. People scoff at paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically all the time.

I have found it rather odd that they have targeted individual consumers for the most part. These all seem like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same level of service and that they won’t have to make such dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but I’m skeptical

> My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come out ahead.

The only answer that matters is the one to the question "how much more are you making per month from your $200/m spend?"

It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2].

Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship...

[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-revenue-hi...

> As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet.

As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.

In terms of revenue for my startup, plenty more.

It looks like their revenue has indeed increased dramatically this year but I can’t find anything saying they’re profitable, which I assume they’d be loudly proclaiming if it had happened. That being said looking at the charts in some of these articles it looks like they might pull it off! I need to look more closely at their pricing model, I wonder what they’re doing differently

Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things

I know very little about this. But isn't the inference cost the big one. Not the training?

Why would they want to be profitable? Genuine question.

Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.

I guess my genuine question in response is can you tell investors "Please give us billions of dollars - we never plan on being profitable, just endlessly growing and raising money from outside sources"? Unless the goal is to be sold off eventually that seems a bit like a hard sell.

You would honestly pay 2k a month to an AI tool? Do you not have other costs like a mortgage or rent?

> "Please give us billions of dollars - we never plan on being profitable, just endlessly growing and raising money from outside sources"?

The goal for investors is to be able to exit their investment for more than they put in.

That doesn't mean the company needs to be profitable at all.

Broadly speaking, investors look for sustainable growth. Think Amazon, when they were spending as much money as possible in the early 2000s to build their distribution network and software and doing anything they possibly could to avoid becoming profitable.

Most of the time companies (and investors) don't look for profits. Profits are just a way of paying more tax. Instead the ideal outcome is growing revenue that is cost negative (ie, could be possible) but the excess money is invested in growing more.

Note that this doesn't mean the company is raising money from external sources. Not being profitable doesn't imply that.