Why Cursor Looks Different on Its Landing Page - Marketing Screenshots Ahead of Product

Fazm Team··2 min read

Why Cursor Looks Different on Its Landing Page

If you have ever downloaded a dev tool and thought "this does not look like the landing page," you are not imagining things. Marketing screenshots for developer tools are frequently ahead of the actual product.

Why This Happens

Dev tool companies move fast. The product ships updates weekly, the landing page gets redesigned quarterly, and the screenshots on the landing page represent where the product is heading, not where it is today.

This is not unique to any one company - it is standard practice across the dev tools space. Reasons include:

  • Design mockups are created before implementation - the designer finishes the new UI before engineering ships it
  • Screenshots are curated - they show the product in its best light with perfect data and ideal configurations
  • A/B testing drives choices - the screenshot that converts best might be an aspirational version of the product
  • Update lag - the product ships a new version but nobody updates the marketing site screenshots

When It Crosses the Line

There is a difference between showing your product's best angle and showing a product that does not exist. Curated screenshots with real features? Fine. Mockups of features that are not built yet presented as current capabilities? That is misleading.

The test: if a user downloads the product and can find every feature shown in the screenshots, the marketing is honest even if the screenshots are idealized.

What Developers Should Do

Do not judge a dev tool by its landing page. Download the free tier, try it for a day, and evaluate the actual experience. Landing pages are marketing - they exist to get you to try the product, not to document it.

And if you are building dev tools yourself, keep your screenshots within one release of the actual product. Your most valuable users are developers, and developers notice discrepancies fast.

Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.

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