Cursor is, by a wide margin, the best AI tool for writing code. Some founders try to use it for everything else too: pitch decks, customer interviews, weekly reviews, planning docs. It mostly works, but it's a code editor with prose support, not a writing tool with code support. Projelli is the inverse: a writing-and-planning tool with the founder-specific templates and Markdown-first archive built in. If you ship code, you probably want both. If you only ship code, just use Cursor.
If you're a developer using Cursor for code and looking at it for the rest of your founder workflow, the question is whether the marginal benefit of a separate writing tool is worth the friction of switching. For most indie founders who do meaningful strategic writing (pitch decks, customer research, planning, weekly reviews), the answer is yes. For developers whose "writing" is mostly README files and inline docs, the answer is probably no, just stay in Cursor.
| Feature | Cursor | Projelli |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | AI-assisted code editing | AI-assisted founder writing |
| File types | Any text; optimized for code | Markdown / docs / aichat / workflow |
| Pricing | $20/mo Pro, free tier limited | $49 once + your AI provider's API |
| BYOK | Pro tier supports BYOK | Yes, all 3 providers |
| Where data lives | Local files (your codebase) | Local files (your workspace folder) |
| Founder workflow templates | No | 15 specific templates |
| Markdown-friendly editor | Yes (it's a text editor) | Yes (CodeMirror with Markdown extensions) |
| Wiki-links + backlinks | No | Yes |
| Document workflows (DOCX, XLSX) | No | Read/write .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .pdf |
| Code completion / inline edits | Industry-leading | No (not a code editor) |
| AI chat in sidebar | Yes | Yes |
| Audio recording + waveform | No | Yes |
| Whiteboard / canvas | No | Yes |
Cursor lets you chat with AI about a file. Projelli lets you run a Pitch Deck template that walks you through the 10 slides, asks the right questions, and produces a finished deck doc. The structured interview saves the "what should I write next" decision overhead.
If your founder workflow includes editing a Word doc your accountant sent, working in an Excel financial model, or annotating a PDF deck, Projelli handles all of these natively. Cursor handles them as text only (and not particularly well for binary formats).
Cursor's "linked files" concept is for code dependencies. Projelli's `[[wiki-link]]` syntax connects strategic docs to each other, building a backlink graph as you work. For an archive of customer interviews, persona docs, and pitch deck drafts, this matters.
Founders record customer interviews. Projelli has a waveform editor with transcription. Cursor doesn't.
Cursor's sidebar, file tree, and tab UX are tuned for code. Projelli's are tuned for founder docs (status bar shows word count not line count; tabs group by topic; file tree colored by document type).
Cursor's inline completion is the best on the market. Projelli has nothing equivalent and shouldn't try.
Cursor's "Composer" and agent mode that edits across files in your repo is genuinely useful for shipping code. Projelli's AI works file-by-file and isn't tuned for codebase-wide refactoring.
Cursor indexes your codebase semantically and pulls relevant code into the AI's context automatically. Projelli has full-text search across documents but doesn't claim to be a code intelligence tool.
Git integration, terminal, debugger, language server protocol, syntax highlighting for hundreds of languages. Cursor inherits all this from VS Code. Projelli has clean Markdown editing and that's it.
For a typical indie founder who ships code, yes. The split:
Both tools support BYOK with the same Anthropic / OpenAI / Google keys, so the API cost is shared across the two tools. Both keep data on your machine. They don't overlap; they live in different parts of your workflow.
| Cursor Pro | Projelli + BYOK | Cursor + Projelli | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $240 | $49 + $60-180 BYOK | $240 + $109-229 |
| Year 2 | $240 | $60-180 BYOK | $240 + $60-180 |
| Year 3 | $240 | $60-180 BYOK | $240 + $60-180 |
| 3-year total | $720 | $229-589 | $949-1,309 |
Most founders end up running both. The combined cost is comfortably under the standard subscription stack (Notion + ChatGPT + Linear + a few others) and replaces multiple tools.
Free download. Pro is $49 one-time. Lifetime is $99. The first 100 buyers get Lifetime at $29.
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