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Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

simonwillison.net

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Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#11

Post by LurkandComment »

pdyc wrote: post #6
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

afaik, enterprise plans are not subsidized. its 20$/seat+api pricing. Unless you are saying api pricing itself is subsidized.

This is market introductory pricing that hasn't factored in cost recovery. Most of it has been run on early investment with the assumption they will recover costs in the long run. The prices are subsidized across the board and they will need to go up signficantly to recover them.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#13

Post by ilia-a »

Seems odd limit, especially since it highly dependant on Token provider used, with Opus this is not much and could easily be burnt in a week or less, but with something like deepseek the 1500 can literarily be an annual budget.

That being said, I do have to wonder why someone as bug as say Uber, simply not rollout OSS model in the cloud for their team, I'd imagine that would be cheapest & most flexible option, while also keeping all the data shared with LLM private.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#14

Post by lelanthran »

square_usual wrote: post #8
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#15

Post by logancbrown »

LurkandComment wrote: post #11
pdyc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik, enterprise plans are not subsidized. its 20$/seat+api pricing. Unless you are saying api pricing itself is subsidized.

This is market introductory pricing that hasn't factored in cost recovery. Most of it has been run on early investment with the assumption they will recover costs in the long run. The prices are subsidized across the board and they will need to go up signficantly to recover them.

None of what you said is true

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#16

Post by dkdcdev »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

at their scale they could also just run a large on-premise or rented (basically still cloud, but cheaper) GPU cluster and run through that. fixed costs, even license a SOTA model’s weights if you’d like

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#17

Post by iceman28 »

ilia-a wrote: post #13

Seems odd limit, especially since it highly dependant on Token provider used, with Opus this is not much and could easily be burnt in a week or less, but with something like deepseek the 1500 can literarily be an annual budget. That being said, I do have to wonder why someone as bug as say Uber, simply not rollout OSS model in the cloud for their team, I'd imagine that would be cheapest & most flexible option, while…

It’s not just about the model but also setting up the system to create and share compute (GPUs) which is quite complicated on its own. Ubers primary business focus isn’t infrastructure.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#18

Post by swiftcoder »

LurkandComment wrote: post #11
pdyc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

afaik, enterprise plans are not subsidized. its 20$/seat+api pricing. Unless you are saying api pricing itself is subsidized.

This is market introductory pricing that hasn't factored in cost recovery. Most of it has been run on early investment with the assumption they will recover costs in the long run. The prices are subsidized across the board and they will need to go up signficantly to recover them.

Assuming this were accurate, then presumably the AI companies would be betting that inference costs come down before the bill is due - I don't see enterprises being willing to absorb another ~10x price increase for tokens (as they've just done going from subscription prices to per-token pricing)

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#19

Post by pier25 »

square_usual wrote: post #8
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

AI companies have more expenses than inference.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#20

Post by jcgrillo »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

> WTF did Uber build with all of that spend?

WTF did anyone build with all that spend? Despite all the feel-good anecdotes about how productive folks feel using ai coding tools there's a deafening silence when it comes to actual, demonstrated efficacy. How can we be this far entrenched in these workflows and still not know whether they actually do anything useful?

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