What happens to your app when the AI company behind your builder changes its mind?

What happened

SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor closed on August 14, 2026. On August 29, OpenAI announced that it intends to wind down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026. Its stated reason: “We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service.” OpenAI said it was giving the maximum notice its contract allows so that developers keep access for as long as possible (checked September 2026; OpenAI's statement as reported by CNBC on August 29, 2026 and DevOps.com on August 31, 2026).

Set aside who is right. Look at the shape of it. A widely used product had a supplier it did not control, the supplier's view of the product's owner changed, and a date was set. Users who had chosen Cursor for a particular model will have a different model, or none, on November 13. The editor is the same. The thing inside it is not.

This is not new, only louder. Model providers change prices, retire versions, cap usage and rewrite terms on their own schedule, and every AI product downstream inherits those changes. What is new is that a small business owner now builds a website inside one of those products, and may not have asked which parts of the result are theirs.

What you own

Four things, if the builder was honest about them. They are the things a customer sees and the things a customer leaves behind.

What you rent

Three things, and the honest builders say so. None of them should be able to take the four above with them when they go.

The trouble starts when a product blurs the two lists. A site that is re-generated by a model on every visit is rented, whatever the plan is called. A price list that lives only in a chat transcript is rented. A domain the builder registered in its own name and will “let you use” is rented. The test is simple: switch the model off in your head and ask what still works tomorrow morning.

You don't need a better model. You need a finished site.

Builders sell model tiers because model tiers are easy to sell. A better model on the expensive plan, a cheaper one on the free plan, and a credit meter between them. It is the shape of the supplier's pricing passed through to you, with the supplier's risk attached.

Think about what a small business site is. A header with the name. Hours, address, prices, services. A form or a cart. A footer. Perhaps sign-in for customers. That job was solvable by the models of two years ago. The failures owners actually meet are not intelligence failures. They are a form that clears after the first letter, a photo upload that breaks a day later, a delete that does not stick, a menu that lives in an image nobody can read. A new model does not fix those. Testing does.

On JustCopy, after every build the site is used in front of you. The builder writes a few short stories from the page it just made, in your words, such as sending the booking form or adding an item and reloading, and runs them in the preview with a visible cursor while you watch. A story that fails is fixed for free, up to two rounds, before you are told the site is done. That practice has caught real problems on customer sites that no model change would have, including a form that lost every letter after the first and an upload that stored a link that expired within the hour.

So the question to ask a builder is not which model it uses this month. It is whether the site it hands you has been used once by someone other than you before it says done.

How JustCopy is set up

Every plan runs the same model. There is no better model on a higher tier and no worse one on Free. What a paid plan buys is more builds a day, your own domain, no badge, more sites, and from the Professional plan a front desk agent on the site. When we change the model, and we have, every plan changes together, and the sites already published change nothing, because they are stored HTML, not a live generation.

There is no credit meter on building. Builds are counted per day: 3 on Free, 5 on Hobby at $9.99 a month, 10 on Starter at $24.99, 25 on Professional at $49.99, 50 on Business at $99.99. Text, color and section changes are unlimited on every plan and do not count as builds, because they do not need a model to think; they change the page's recipe directly. You never buy a bundle of tokens, and a supplier's price change does not show up as a smaller bundle.

The site is yours to publish where you like. Free publishes with the JustCopy badge on a JustCopy address. From Hobby it lives on a domain you registered, with no badge. From Starter you can download the site's code. The records your app collects sit in a Data tab you can read, and every published app has a stable public page with its own title, description and structured data that search engines and assistants can index. The plans are laid out on the pricing page.

Four questions to ask any builder

1. 1

   Does the site load without the model?

   Open a published page with the builder logged out. If it renders as plain HTML, you own it. If it needs the builder to think first, you are renting.

2. 2

   Is the domain mine?

   Can you point a domain you registered at the site, and can you point it away later? Which plan does that start on?

3. 3

   Can I get the data out?

   The records your app stored. Look for a list you can read and export, not a promise in a help article.

4. 4

   What changes when the model changes?

   Ask directly. The honest answer is that builds may get better or slower, and the sites already published change nothing.

Ask them before you have a hundred customers who know the address. The Cursor story will end one way or another by November 12. The useful part is that it made the question visible while there is still time to answer it on purpose.

Questions