We Raised $5.7m to Launch Cto.new Completely for Free
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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The company behind Cto.new raised $5.7M to launch their product for free, sparking discussion around their business model and the value proposition of their service.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 15, 2025 at 11:01 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 15, 2025 at 11:33 AM EDT
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— 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.
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.
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.