We bought cursor.cafe for $5. They gave us coffee.

Facu, my co-founder, was scrolling Twitter when he saw a tweet from Rauchg: Vercel Domains now sells .cafe domains.

Naturally, he typed cursor.cafe. Available. Five dollars. He bought it before finishing his coffee.

We thought it was hilarious. We're building in the same space as Cursor (a QA engineering agent) and they were rapidly expanding into everything we were doing. Owning their domain felt like holding a tiny, absurd piece of leverage. Not for money. For a conversation. Someday, we figured, they'd want it. And when they did, we'd have a reason to talk.

They wanted it

Over the next three months, people from Cursor's growth team kept reaching out. "Hey, would you sell cursor.cafe?" Different people, same ask.

We said no every time. Not because we had a plan. We just knew we didn't want money. We wanted something, we just hadn't figured out what yet.

San Francisco

A month ago we landed in SF. Cursor reached out again. This time we said: "Let's just go to your office."

The timing was perfect, or terrible, depending on how you look at it. We were deep in the "should we pivot?" phase with Bugster. Building a QA agent is fun until the company you're loosely competing with is Cursor and they're going after everything.

So we went. And honestly? The conversation was incredibly valuable. They confirmed what we suspected: they're going after all of it. That clarity alone was worth more than any domain negotiation.

The deal

After a great conversation, real insights into where the market was heading, and genuine clarity on our own direction, they handed us our payment for cursor.cafe:

Two bags of Cursor-branded coffee. And some API credits.

That's it. Five dollar domain. Two bags of coffee. Zero regrets.

The math

Could we have pushed for money? Probably. Some people told us cursor.cafe was worth $100K. Maybe more, maybe less, who knows.

But we got something better: a real conversation with the team building one of the fastest-growing dev tools in the world, at the exact moment we needed clarity on our own product. That's not something you can buy on Vercel Domains.

The coffee was shit, though.