Challenge

As Cursor prepared to launch in 2022, its small engineering team was focused on perfecting its agentic development platform. “The end goal for us is to evolve building software into something that’s higher level and more productive,” said Michael Truell, founder and CEO of the San Francisco–based company. Truell and his team aim to eliminate the toil involved in building software, with developers instead focused on controlling the software’s logic.

While Cursor’s agents amplified the team’s product velocity, engineers were still stretched thin. The company had a pressing need for payment and billing infrastructure as it prepared to scale quickly.

Cursor needed an online payment and billing platform that would provide the same simple, intuitive customer experience that its code editor offered. A seamless checkout and a broad range of accepted payment methods were the highest priorities as the company worked toward monetization.

On the backend, Cursor needed a provider that offered robust APIs to minimize the need for customization by the company’s engineers, who needed to focus on building the company’s core product. The company also sought tools that its small finance team could use to efficiently close the books and gain insights from payment and billing data.

Solution

In Stripe, Cursor found exactly what it was looking for: an end-to-end payment and billing solution that didn’t pull engineers away from building the company’s platform. Instead of spending months building custom billing infrastructure, Cursor used Stripe’s prebuilt functionality and developer-friendly APIs to bring a solution online in less than a week. “We chose Stripe for its ability to minimize engineering bandwidth while providing out-of-the-box functionality for most use cases,” said Daniel St. Jules, engineering lead at Cursor.

Stripe Billing provided the tools Cursor needed to go to market quickly as it monetized its recurring subscription business, which included multiple subscription tiers. For customized scenarios like student discounts, Cursor layered internal database solutions on top of Stripe’s flexible infrastructure. The company also relied on Billing to support its evolving pricing strategies without the need to build and maintain extensive billing infrastructure.

Using Stripe Payments, Cursor activated credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets—including Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Alipay—with no coding or development time. Cursor built its checkout flow using Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt payment form designed to reduce friction and increase conversion, as the payment surface. The team turned on nine payment methods from the Stripe Dashboard including Link, Stripe’s digital wallet that drives conversion by autofilling saved payment details for a fast, simple checkout. In addition to cards, Cursor offers US customers the option to pay with Instant Bank Payments—available exclusively through Link—to lower processing costs. With Instant Bank Payments, their customers can check out using their bank account in just a few clicks. Payments are confirmed instantly and settle in two business days—just like card payments—and Stripe guarantees the risk of bank-initiated returns. The Optimized Checkout Suite uses AI models to dynamically present the most relevant payment methods to each checkout session to increase conversion, helping drive revenue for the startup.

Cursor also needed a provider that could not only prevent fraudulent transactions but help it keep up with the developing fraud patterns facing dynamic AI companies. Cursor uses Radar for Fraud Teams to detect and block fraud as it occurs, helping its lean team focus on driving growth rather than managing fraud and related costs. Cursor also uses Radar to prevent free trial abuse, where fraudulent actors cycle through free trials to get free access to their product without converting. This was an expensive problem for Cursor, because their product usage came with high compute costs. With Radar, Cursor is able to identify fraudulent actors’ free trials at trial signup time, so they can block those trials before they drive up product usage.

Cursor also uses the Payments analytics page in the Stripe Dashboard to track and analyze key metrics, such as its customers’ most frequently used payment methods and card acceptance rates. This data provides a comprehensive understanding of Cursor’s payments performance, enabling the team to identify opportunities for improvement that can increase revenue.

To boost revenue recovery, Cursor adopted Smart Retries, which uses AI to identify the optimal day and time to retry a failed payment. In 2024, Smart Retries recovered 38.4% of failed payments for Stripe users.

To accelerate financial operations and insights, Cursor adopted Stripe Data Pipeline and Stripe Sigma. With Data Pipeline, Cursor automatically syncs their complete Stripe dataset into their data warehouse. This integration powers their internal performance dashboards, providing reliable reporting on core metrics like revenue and churn. The pipeline also serves as the backend for a custom billing operations dashboard, empowering the team to resolve complex billing inquiries and manage customer operations more efficiently.

When the team needs fast insights on their Stripe data, they rely on Stripe Sigma. By querying their Stripe data directly within the Dashboard, Cursor can move from questions to insights in minutes, without the need to pull data into external tools.

“Stripe Sigma made it easy for us to quickly explore our data tables,” said St. Jules.

Results

Cursor ships fast with Stripe’s billing and payment infrastructure

Stripe’s ready-to-use functionality minimized the time Cursor engineers had to spend on payments and billing. As a result, the team was able to stay fully focused on developing and refining their AI-powered code editor.

Billing supports Cursor’s efforts to scale

With Billing, Cursor could introduce new subscription tiers and experiment with usage-based billing as the business grew. Cursor used this flexibility to adapt its pricing models over time without needing to rebuild billing logic.

“Our subscription model has evolved since launch, and Stripe has been instrumental in enabling international billing and streamlining processes,” said St. Jules.

50% of Cursor customers already use Link

Adding Link as a payment method streamlines the checkout process substantially for Cursor customers—a significant upgrade given that 50% of Cursor customers are already using Link. What’s more, 80% of existing Link customers choose Link at checkout when it’s available.

A fast checkout drives growth

Cursor’s implementation of the Optimized Checkout Suite gave customers a simple, fast checkout process with no redirects or extra steps. “When you go to Cursor and check out, you’re presented with a Stripe-generated page that is optimized to reduce friction and is streamlined for a clear customer experience,” said St. Jules. “We simply plugged in Stripe’s API and instantly had a world-class checkout page.”