Earlier this year, a thread on Hacker News about Cursor’s support practices got thousands of upvotes. The complaints were not about the product. They were about emails.
“Then they ignored my 3+ emails in response asking them to refund.”
“I replied with detailed feedback on why I canceled and accepted the refund offer, then never heard back from them.”
“After thanking them and agreeing to the refund, was promptly ignored.”
Cursor is one of the fastest-growing developer tools in recent memory. They are not ignoring customers because they do not care. They are ignoring customers because their support infrastructure has not kept up with their growth. The result is the same either way.
What the customer experiences
From the customer’s side, an unanswered email is an answer. It says: your issue is not important enough for us to respond to.
It does not matter that three engineers are working on the bug they reported. It does not matter that a refund is being processed manually. If nobody told them, they assume nothing is happening.
41% of customers expect a response within six hours of sending a support email. Only 33% of companies actually meet that standard. The gap is not mostly made up of companies that do not care. It is mostly made up of companies where emails fell through the cracks.
The silent churn problem
The customers who feel ignored rarely tell you. They do not write angry emails about the lack of response. They just stop using the product. They cancel quietly. They tell two people at their next industry event that your support is unreliable.
“For every customer who reports a bug, there are ten others who do not, and just stop using your app.” That ratio applies equally to support emails. For every customer who follows up on an ignored email, ten others write the company off and move on.
You never see the ones who leave silently. You only see the revenue numbers.
How emails fall through the cracks
It is almost never malicious. It almost always comes down to one of the same few causes.
No ownership. The email landed in a shared inbox. Three people saw it. Nobody replied because everyone assumed someone else was going to.
Buried by volume. A busy afternoon pushed the email off the first page. By the next morning, it was invisible.
Context switching. Someone read it, meant to reply after finishing something else, and forgot. No system reminded them.
Growth outpacing infrastructure. The same support setup that worked for fifty customers does not work for five hundred. But nothing changed except the volume.
What actually prevents it
You cannot fix this with more effort. Adding “check the inbox more often” to the team’s responsibilities does not scale and does not prevent the underlying problem.
What prevents it is structure. Every incoming email needs to be seen, classified, and assigned before it has a chance to go unnoticed. When a customer email arrives as a message in a Slack or Discord channel with urgency and category already attached, it does not hide. It sits in a channel your team is already watching. Someone picks it up. It gets resolved.
The customer you almost ignored gets a response. They do not become a churned user or a negative word-of-mouth data point. They stay.
That is the difference between hoping your inbox works and knowing it does.