Replit vs Cursor: shipped apps with revenue receipts

Cursor's builders show more revenue evidence — but read the sample before the result. We index 44 cases under Cursor and 13 under Replit, three on both lists: 54 distinct businesses with a 3-to-1 imbalance baked in. Cursor holds 10 third-party-verified revenue figures to Replit's 3. The Replit side is thin; read it as a direction, not a verdict.

Contents

• ·Which side has more revenue receipts?
• ·Where do the cases on each side cluster?
• ·What do the evidence grades say?
• ·Which one should you pick?
• ·What these numbers cannot tell you
• ·Frequently asked questions

Which side has more revenue receipts?

Cursor, by every count we keep. Ten of its 44 cases carry third-party-verified revenue against three of Replit's 13. Strip out the platform scale references — the vendors themselves — and it becomes seven verified app-level figures to one. The gap is real. Part of it is sample size.

Take the vendors off the board. Cursor runs $500M/yr with 60 people at a $9B valuation; Replit runs ~$160M ARR at a $3B valuation across 350K paid apps. Both verified, both scale references, and neither says whether your app will earn.

"Side" is the cohort a case is filed under — usually because the founder named that tool on camera.

Grades, first use: ✅ verified is corroborated beyond the founder's word, usually a dashboard read on camera. 🗣 founder-reported is the operator's own claim. 📎 creator-relayed is someone passing on another's number. 🔮 unproven means no figure, or a target.

One row carries the argument: the only verified app-level figure on the Replit side is Peptide Tracker's $11K MRR, built by a solo undergraduate in two weeks. Cursor has seven, topping at Gravl's $440K/mo.

Where do the cases on each side cluster?

Replit's cases cluster on SaaS and on borrowed benchmarks; Cursor's spread across ten categories with an operator attached to each. Five of Replit's 13 are SaaS, and three of the 13 lead with a revenue number belonging to a different company. That is the sharpest structural difference in the data.

Those three: the Floe-style agency SaaS clone quotes $1.3M/mo for the original, while the cloner reports $0. The single-page read-later app quotes a $60K/mo benchmark. The TinyURL clone quotes $200K/mo and 40M monthly visits for TinyURL itself. Each is honest about whose number it is; none shows the build earning a dollar.

That is a genre artifact, not a tool defect. Replit demos are made for people who cannot code, and the hook that lands is "look what this earns," not "look what we earned." Cursor content pulls people who already shipped: BlogToPin at $16K MRR from 400+ subscribers, Lancer at $10K MRR in month three or four on $0 of paid ads.

The rest follows. Cursor's cohort is more solo — 27 of 44 against 5 of 13 — and carries more Tier 1, our copy-this-now grade: 16 against 3.

What do the evidence grades say?

Both cohorts are mostly unverified, and they weaken in different places. Replit breaks down as 3 verified, 5 founder-reported, 4 creator-relayed, 1 unproven. Cursor is 10 verified, 26 founder-reported, 4 creator-relayed, 4 unproven. The same 23% verified rate on both sides, from very different samples.

The creator-relayed four are not equivalent. Three of Replit's are the benchmark citations above. Cursor's describe the business in question: Aura reports $15,000 MRR and 21,700+ users in about a month, posted on X by the founder. We still grade it 📎: a screenshot of a post is not a dashboard.

We read transcripts closely enough to catch contradictions, and publish them: Rabbit Holes AI headlines $80K in six months from 1,200 paying users on a $90 licence, then the same video computes 200 × $90 = $18K. For the ranked view, see AI coding tools revenue, ranked in our AI coding tools hub.

Which one should you pick?

Pick on who is doing the typing. Replit's evidence comes from people who could not have shipped without a platform that hosts the database, the auth and the deploy. Cursor's comes from people who keep a repo and ship repeatedly. Neither cohort shows the tool causing the revenue.

You cannot read code and you need a live app this week

Replit. Its founder's argument is a decade of built-in infrastructure — database, storage, auth — while rivals stall a month in, and the cases match. Peptide Tracker reached $11K MRR and $51K in seven weeks from one undergraduate. WeeNote reached ₩20M/mo from a former elementary-school teacher.

You already keep a repo and your bottleneck is distribution

Cursor. Profit AI's non-technical founder describes the loop as uploading a spreadsheet as a CSV, telling Cursor to build it, then fixing everything Cursor got wrong: $147,000 since December. Prayer Lock took three days to write; the real work was finding one video format that worked.

You want to sell to builders rather than be one

Cursor, and it is not close. Cursor Directory turned a three-hour weekend project into $34,000–35,000/mo, and Aura sells templates into the same audience. Our Replit cohort holds no comparable ecosystem business — which may mean that market is smaller, or that we have not indexed it.

What these numbers cannot tell you

Three things: whether the tool caused the outcome, what share of attempts failed, and how clean the tagging is. We index businesses that published a number, usually on camera. Every quiet failure built with either tool is invisible here, and in every other comparison you will read.

Tagging is the loosest joint: founders use several tools at once, and a case is filed under whichever they named. Three sit on both lists — Replit itself, Guilty Chef at ~$700–800/mo, and Scan Profit + Closer Coach at ~$42K MRR.

The downside is thin on both sides — one cautionary record each. Replit's is the 97% audit: 97% of 1,000+ tracked vibe-coded apps dead, abandoned, breached or under $500/mo after six months. Creator-relayed, not a census, but the only failure-rate estimate in either cohort. Cursor's is Topical Map AI, ~$120K gross before a five-figure sale.

For the per-tool breakdowns, see apps built with Replit and apps built with Cursor, or start with what is Replit and what is Cursor AI.

More in AI coding tools.

Frequently asked questions

Is Replit or Cursor better for making money?

Cursor has more evidence behind it, not a proven advantage. Ten of 44 Cursor cases are third-party verified against three of 13 Replit cases — the same 23% rate from a sample three times larger. We have watched more Cursor builders succeed because we have watched more Cursor builders.

How does Replit compare with Claude Code?

We index 49 cases filed under Claude Code, 10 of them third-party verified — the same verified count as Cursor, from a slightly larger cohort. Replit's 13 include exactly one verified app-level revenue figure. Claude Code cases also skew toward services and data assets rather than consumer apps, which changes what the comparison is about.

What does "third-party verified" mean here?

The figure was corroborated beyond the founder's own claim, most often a dashboard, Stripe screen or app-store payout read on camera. Founder-reported means the operator stated it and we could not check. Creator-relayed means a third party passed on someone else's number. Unproven means no figure was disclosed.

Can a non-coder actually earn money with Replit?

Yes, and one case is verified rather than claimed: Peptide Tracker at $11K MRR and $51K in seven weeks, built by a solo undergraduate in about two weeks. WeeNote's ₩20M/mo from a former teacher is founder-reported. Two cases are not a pattern, and neither founder won on code — both won on knowing one audience first.