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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

#141

Post by flyinglizard »

hrpnk wrote: post #127
pmontra wrote: post #125

I wonder what they are doing with $1500 per month. I'm on Claude Pro $20 plan and I'm doing well. That's 3 days per week. On the other 2 days I'm using a customer's Claude Max, I don't know if it's the $100 or the $200 plan, but I'm sharing it with some of its other developers.

$1500/mth is token pricing. Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. These plans are economical only if majority of users spend less tokens in $ than the plan's costs. This subsidizes the gap vs. power users who spend multiple k$ monthly in API tokens.

Yea, I’m sure the personal plans are subsidized. I have $200 Claude Max at home and straight API pricing at work and equivalent work would easily cost me 5x if not more on the API.

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

#142

Post by sfn42 »

sevenzero wrote: post #124
testdelacc1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per token costs will fall, but the harnesses will get more token hungry. Instead of just centering the div it’ll spin up a battery of agents to architect, critique, advise, code, review, refactor and so on.

I wish I could disable most of these. I already hate all the "oh you're actually right, let me fix that" nonsense. Then it proceeds to burn 50k tokens on the git history instead of copying logic A from a different part of the codebase to logic B, where I want that exact logic without having to write the boilerplate myself...

A lot of the time if you're copying code from one place to another what you actually want to do is abstract it so you can reuse it in both places.

The LLM can easily do this type of stuff, just tell it and it'll happily do it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell people they need to work closer with the AI, tell it how to do things. Don't just tell it what to do and get frustrated when it does it differently than you would.

A good way to achieve this without writing huge prompts is tell it to plan the change first. Just give it some vague low-effort directions. It'll usually get most things right, you tell it what you want different and once you're happy you tell it to go ahead.

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

#143

Post by dangus »

Buttons840 wrote: post #99
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?

I think companies will eventually just buy a local AI server. Using local hardware is expensive when it's running a complicated software stack that can break in 10,000 different ways. These eventual local AI servers will just talk some protocol for AI and sit in the corner and nobody will think about them. I guess they still might need access to various systems, so idk. Eventually I think someone will offer "AI in a…

I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS?

“AI in a box” sounds a heck of a lot like “the box” from the Silicon Valley TV show. Or the Google search appliance. Or name any other on-premise thing that is equally dinosauric.

The real finding of this article is that AI tokens are direct competitors with offshoring. $1,500/month buys you a whole employee in India.

And this is before AI companies inevitably increase pricing after the conclusion of the growth phase.

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

#144

Post by mrweasel »

skybrian wrote: post #85
mrweasel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't really Uber, Microsoft or Nvidia, it's all the smaller none IT companies that also have developers on staff. They are screwed. $1500 per seat per month is just way to expensive, but they also can't afford to build and maintain their own on-premise solution. If Microsoft can't afford to run CoPilot for their own developer, what chance does any of their customers stand? If the large, well founded IT c…

It's an extra 18k a year for developer tools when they're paying how much a year per developer? Having software developers at all isn't cheap. Also, I don't believe you need to spend $1500 a month on a coding agent if you optimize usage at all.

That depends on where you are. $18K is the equivalent of paying around 15% more for your developer.

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

#145

Post by empath75 »

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?

I think probably the correct spend is something closer to 10x that if people can figure agent coordination problems out. It's not even really about capability at this point, it's about keeping track of what agents are doing.

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

#147

Post by pm90 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #99
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?

I think companies will eventually just buy a local AI server. Using local hardware is expensive when it's running a complicated software stack that can break in 10,000 different ways. These eventual local AI servers will just talk some protocol for AI and sit in the corner and nobody will think about them. I guess they still might need access to various systems, so idk. Eventually I think someone will offer "AI in a…

Yep, its already quite easy to do so with tools like opencode/openrouter. Ive used some open source models and they seem … ok? Im not doing foundational math, just refactoring code, understanding existing code etc. I don’t see a future where companies blow 11% of employee compensation on a single tool; the hosted AI server + oss models will 99% win out.

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

#148

Post by Daishiman »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #69
simonw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely getting that much value out of Claude Code and Copilot.

You're a content creator; you define your revenue stream. Uber engineers do not define their revenue stream; the product leadership team does. $1500/mo of AI spend by engineers does not equate to revenue. They need to figure out revenue first before zeroing in on AI spend.

$18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer.

Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.

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

#149

Post by freediddy »

ValentineC wrote: post #104

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…

Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.

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

#150

Post by thefunnyman »

apsurd wrote: post #135
sevenzero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could disable most of these. I already hate all the "oh you're actually right, let me fix that" nonsense. Then it proceeds to burn 50k tokens on the git history instead of copying logic A from a different part of the codebase to logic B, where I want that exact logic without having to write the boilerplate myself...

Makes me think of how my Claude.md files specifies to use the built in framework code-generators (rails). Those generators are deterministically right every time. I wonder how often the Agent actually follows the guidance. I do see them follow it when I look. But it doesn't seem so every time.

This is tricky since it can and will ignore your md directions. When possible I try to lean on tool call hooks or skills that invoke deterministic scripts. As much as you can remove the "choice" the better though still there's a lot of randomness in how reliably it invokes skills ime.
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