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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

#271

Post by rudedogg »

_jab wrote: post #186
f311a wrote: post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

It's pretty simple; organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer, which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers. If that number grows significantly, then I bet companies will start exploring flash models more, as you propose.

> organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer

One organization, that is a software company

> which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers

My peers are using $20/mo plans, only a handful are using more than $100/mo in tokens. We haven’t had any limits imposed yet.

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

#272

Post by andersmurphy »

f311a wrote: post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

This a thousand times. The bigger models also have a habit of overcomplicating things.

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

#273

Post by EA-3167 »

Animats wrote: post #169
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…

Raise them, more likely. NVidia says that GPU hardware prices won't decrease until at least 2030. The world is out of fab capacity.

Seriously, they’re trying to justify trillion+ IPO’s while setting piles of money on fire, prices aren’t going DOWN.

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

#274

Post by fg137 »

rd wrote: post #180
freediddy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if I could start a US-based company with good data regulation and just serve open-weight models at a competitive price. I feel like the real barrier is just that most companies willing to adopt AI usage enough to make it worth it at this point don't want to be using inferior models.

It's called AWS. Bedrock is right there. Price or data policy is never the issue. The models themselves are the problem -- most large US companies are not going to touch them.

Source: directly involved in these discussions. You can downvote as much as you'd like but you can't ignore the facts.

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

#275

Post by eikenberry »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #225
eikenberry wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are in the same ballpark for deepseek-v4-flash, but deepseek-v4-pro from deepseek is still around 1/2 of the alternatives.

I'm pretty sure that Deepseek said that pricing was promotional. Be curious to see if it lasts. V3 pricing from them was right in line with what the commodity providers are charging.

They announced a few weeks back that the promotional pricing was permanent.

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

#276

Post by sweetjuly »

pqtyw wrote: post #101
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?

How is tok/s not a bottleneck I? I assume most people still use ai agents interactively rather than leaving them to do their own thing during the night. I find anything below 50 tps or so entirely unusable... Regardless its Apples to oranges anyway, inference is quite cheap for open weight models its just that Claude and OpenAI can charge very high margins compared to e.g. DeepSeek or various provider on OpenRouter s…

Is interactive use for coding something that actually works today? With unsafe mode, even frontier hosted models are slow enough I end up just tabbing out to work on other tasks. It would need to be much faster if I am to sit and stare at it while it churns. Local models might be a lot slower but workflow-wise it doesn't change much for me.

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

#277

Post by jbvlkt »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

Because writing huge amounts of code is easy for humans too. Agents already proved that they can do it. But are agents able to maintain it? I do not know and unless I know for sure, I am not fully committing to AI generated code.

i.e. I am able to write about 1k lines of code of "acceptable" quality per week. Which means in 1 year, there will be about 5Ok LoC. I am pretty sure, that I would have to spent like 60-80% of time to maintain 1st year code and the rest to make new features in the second year so I would have to hire more people and spent time to onboard them to maintain velocity. All of that are rough estimates, probably overoptimistic and way worse in 3rd year. Good luck doing such estimates with code agents. Even worse if you already have huge amounts of legacy code.

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

#278

Post by fontain »

pmontra wrote: post #246
hrpnk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

> Your other plans are fixed price with rate limits where you get more tokens than the dollar equivalent you pay monthly. Or the fixed cost plans reflect the real cost and the people paying API prices give them the profit. Anyway, none of my customers will let me bill them $1500 more (about $75 per day) because I'm using AI. And what for? I'm not working to move money from the pockets of my customers to the pockets o…

No, we know from the financials of these companies that API prices are close to being at cost and the individual developer plans are heavily subsidized (because they are roughly 10% of API cost per token[1]).

If plans were at cost and API pricing was marked up that would mean there’s a 90%+ profit margin on tokens and instead of raising money and talking about revenue, Anthropic and OpenAI would be talking about their obscene profits.

[1] the caveat is that the average plan user probably doesn’t use all of their quota, I guess maybe 30% is the average across all users.

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

#279

Post by throwaway613746 »

john01dav wrote: post #236

Why isn't self hosting (even just renting a GPU server, not necessarily on premise) at large companies or hosting via something like together AI to run the open weight models not more common? I've tried the open weight models and the premium models like Opus and Gemini Pro, and I find that the latter are a little better, but not nearly to the degree to justify the extreme price difference, since the differences large…

[dead]

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

#280

Post by baggy_trough »

chmod775 wrote: post #269
saulpw wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

Can't remember the last time that happened.
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