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

simonwillison.net

481–490 of 819 posts

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

#481
I use Claude every day. Often for multiple hours a day. Basically doing my job not worrying how many tokens I spend (as in too many or too few). This is a pretty complex code base (database optimizer and related).

Just looked at spent for the past 30 day, didn't even come to $600. 95% of my tokens are from cache. If I were to reach even $1500 I have to let claude run unsupervised over night (and with the amount of mistakes it still makes and guidance it needs, I do not believe we are there yet.)

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear of loss to competitors embracing a technology creates a fear driven adoption. Let me ask you this: is any technology worth so much break-neck adoption without first seeing clear evidence of ROI? No. The adoption is irrational.

What makes you think there is no clear evidence of ROI?

All of the articles and CFO’s saying so, and companies like Uber cutting back on AI spend.

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

#483
post #247

> A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending,... > 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. This whole article seems to me like Multi level marketing "businesses" where 'Diamonds' have made their m…

That's just Simon Willison since LLMs came out. It's glaringly obvious that he's a paid shill.

Genuine question: what would make me a "paid shill"?

Who do you think would be paying me, and what would they expect in return?

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do the math, they don't have a choice. If China captures America's AI market it'll cause a major depression. They'll give it the BYD treatment, though it'll be a lot less effective.

They'll ban them because (unless run locally or self-hosted) they are just data capture tools for the China.

If it’s open weight then anyone can run it for you. Presumably someone you trust just as much as US proprietary models.

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

#485
post #447
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My usual rule of thumb for the US is north of double the received compensation but something in that range sounds reasonable with such high compensation. It's actually really interesting and underappreciated how that fully-loaded cost varies from country to country. Canada (for most salary ranges) is about half again instead of double owing to the insurance portion coming out of income tax rather than being a hidden…

Why would double be a good rule of thumb for typical US SWEs? Most of the costs aren't proportional to salary, and the ones which are aren't anywhere approaching 50%, much less double.

The costs to hire management and "support staff" like TPMs that scale with SWEs that help them meet goals is proportional to SWEs - often that is taken for the higher end fully loaded costs, depending on how you define it. Office space in downtown SF, Mountain View, or Palo Alto costs more than office space for back office workers in Nashville or Utah. Firms that hire SWEs often have fringe benefits like free food etc. and while they may apply to all workers, it tends to go along with hiring lots of SWEs.

But yeah, double is insane. When I saw prices for COBRA from Facebook, it was $3300 a month, and that was god-tier insurance - the insurance benefits were so good they had a custom list of what was covered that was probably way better than anything available on the market (e.g. you want brand name drugs? no problem. You don't want to try both ambien and trazadone before taking a sleep medication doctors actually recommend? No problem - etc.) - but for my needs it was barely better than COBRA costing way less than half. $3300/mo, or even $1200/mo for an entry level ops worker is a lot of their salary, and probably where the double comes from. At SWE compensation most of it ceases to scale.

The fully loaded costs including proportional management costs isn't relevant to the true marginal engineer, but estimates I've gotten from higher-ups definitely factor into engineering decisions about "should we spend engineering time to save money/make more money - how much will doing this thing cost the company" (opportunity costs are also relevant, but usually less grounded, since most projects don't have concrete benefits like "we will save $x/yr in infra costs")

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

#486

I use Claude every day. Often for multiple hours a day. Basically doing my job not worrying how many tokens I spend (as in too many or too few). This is a pretty complex code base (database optimizer and related). Just looked at spent for the past 30 day, didn't even come to $600. 95% of my tokens are from cache. If I were to reach even $1500 I have to let claude run unsupervised over night (and with the amount of mi…

is this with a subscription or pure API billing?

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think there is no clear evidence of ROI?

All of the articles and CFO’s saying so, and companies like Uber cutting back on AI spend.

Uber cutting back to ~$1,500/engineer/tool/month makes it look to me like they think there's at least $1,500 of monthly ROI to be had per engineer.

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

#488
> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package.

when looking at costs - numbers make sense. however decisions as an org/company/solo founder - costs help you set prices, but to reach profitability you want to model around ROI.

now the question is what's the ROI for a $36K/investment per engineer or $90M for the total org ?

I bet the ROI is negative.

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

#489

I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month? Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code…

You are paying account pricing. Uber is paying API pricing. You're $100/m plan is likely equivalent to thousands of dollars of API pricing. You are being subsidized by the companies using AI.

And this is why as the freeloader (includes me) volume goes up, they add more and more rules to constrain us.

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

#490

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?

> Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

NFTs? My company had nothing to do with blockchain but I ended up working on NFT integration regardless.

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