We Raised $5.7M to Launch Cto.new Completely for Free
super-empathy-963213.framer.appOffering frontier models for free at a Claude Code Max or ChatGPT Pro levels isn't going to happen for very long with a $5.7M raise.
Assuming 100% of that raise goes to LLM costs (almost certainly unrealistic because of needs to pay salaries, etc), and assuming a conservative $100/month in frontier model LLM charges when doing serious coding, that raise amounts to $5.7M / $100 = 57,000 user-months, or less than 5,000 users for a year.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where this raise isn't completely burned through in a couple of months, tops.
It is abusing .new domain. The idea of .new domain is to create something new e.g meet.new creates new Google Meet, docs.new creates new Google Docs
cto.new creates a new cto chat session from the homepage
> Navigation to a .new domain must bring a user directly into the action generation or online creation flow. Navigation or redirection to a homepage or landing page that requires the user to take additional steps or clicks to initiate action or creation will not be deemed to comply with this policy.
— https://www.registry.google/policies/registration/new/
I’m not sure using it as their homepage that has a text box on it is really what they had in mind. It’s a page where you can take steps to create a chat session, it isn’t a new chat session in itself. This is like if facebook.new brought you to your main feed, since there’s a “What’s on your mind?” text box where you can create a post. Compare that with something like docs.new which will automatically create a document and open it for editing with zero steps.
Interesting, free AI coding agents but "completely for free because we use anonymized usage data for model training and other purposes."
Not quite sure how I feel about that, but I guess the major AI players are already using chats for model training anyways. Reminds me a bit of OpenRouter with grok code fast 1, trading off hot models for usage stats.
When something is "free", YOU are the product!