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Replit's CEO Called Apple a Liar and Said He Has No Plans to Sell

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for ten years. In the last 18 months alone, the company went from $2.8 million in full-year revenue to tracking toward a billion-dollar annual run rate. Last week, he was candid about three things everyone in the AI coding space is talking about right now: the Cursor situation, the Apple standoff, and whether Replit is next to sell.

On Cursor, Masad was direct. Reports suggest Cursor has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, and SpaceX has reportedly made a $60 billion acquisition offer for the company. Masad said that kind of financial position makes independence very difficult, especially for a company that also wants to invest in its own model training. His argument is that Replit has avoided that trap by targeting a different customer and building a full-stack platform, from the initial prompt all the way to a deployed, scalable application with security and databases built in. The result is a business that has been gross margin positive for over a year.

The Apple situation is where things got interesting. Replit's App Store updates have been blocked for months, even as competitors like Lovable received approval this week. Masad's theory is that Apple felt threatened when Replit launched the ability to build iOS apps in December, after charts began circulating showing how many apps were entering the App Store through Replit. Apple's stated reason for the blocks is that Replit downloads new code to devices after the App Store review process, which violates their guidelines. Masad's response was blunt: he called it a lie and said Replit can prove it in court if it comes to that.

On the question of selling, Masad said he would rather not. He pointed to Replit's net revenue retention of up to 300% in some cases, enterprise customers including Zillow, Meta, and Bain and Company, and the broader entrepreneurship happening on the platform as reasons to stay independent. When asked to rank the AI model providers Replit works with, he said Anthropic remains the best for the core agentic loop and tool calling, GPT-5 is catching up fast, and Google's Flash models lead on price and performance.

He estimates that the transactions flowing through Replit from its customers are growing triple digits month over month. He expects Replit's customers to be generating more revenue than Replit itself pretty soon. For a platform that was built on the idea of turning everyone into a software creator, that might actually be the point.