Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 819 posts

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

#751

Post by skybrian »

KronisLV wrote: post #418
skybrian wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Latvia, the net salary for a Java dev is around 1729 - 4314 EUR, based on https://www.algas.lv/algu-informacija/informacijas-tehnologi... (crowd sourced data) For the employer those employees cost between 2945 - 7736 EUR per month based on https://kalkulatori.lv/lv/algas-kalkulators (income and social taxes). So on the lower end that's (1500 USD ~ 1300 EUR) close to half the total expenses of such a developer, on…

I wonder how this plays out. Perhaps programmers in these countries will use cheaper models like Deepseek and they will be able to compete better, so offshoring continues?

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

#752

Post by upcoming-sesame »

KronisLV wrote: post #407
cheeze wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. There is definitely a huge market for a "good enough" model running within the country of the company

> Deepseek has some models in Bedrock. Just looked into it, seems like at most they have just 3.2, not 4: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ Looking around their catalogue more, most of their models seem quite outdated, aside from the OpenAI and Anthropic ones (but those get more expensive). I wouldn't willingly pick Bedrock and would instead throw money at OpenRouter, that has both a bunch of providers, as well…

Azure AI Foundry has Deepseek 4

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

#753

Post by nicebyte »

newsoftheday wrote: post #736
thundergolfer wrote: post #373

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs. I…

> $330k/year For a traditional software engineer? I retired last year after 3 decades and my salary was about the same as it was in the early 2000's at the last company I was at. Maybe I should have negotiated more but I thought only FAANG paid traditional pre-AI engineers more than $250K.

250k for base pay is about in line with median I'd say.

If 250k was the total comp (taking into account bonus/stocks/what have you) then yeah, you definitely should have negotiated.

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

#754

Post by therealdrag0 »

LtWorf wrote: post #689
therealdrag0 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience. Slow is smooth with AI is still productivity improvement.

But is it enough of an improvement to justify the cost? (Since the current raises are probably just the beginning)

It depends :). It’s enough I pay for it for my silly side project. Historically we’ve paid a lot for software tools. IDEs and even documentation used to be pretty expensive. AI seems at least on par with those.

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

#755

Post by limagnolia »

hazelnut wrote: post #301
ipunchghosts wrote: post #293

Why aren't they using Claude code 20x for 200/month?

if you have more than x seats, you have to use Enterprise pricing as far as I know which is pay as you go with a pool.

At that point, why wouldn't they just give their employees a corporate debit card and say "go and buy the subscription you want."? I suppose the enterprise plans come with additional controls and features? But are they worth it?

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

#757

Post by nikolay »

Uber is a service company. Maybe there are tons of changes on the backend, but literally anything customer-facing barely ever changes. So, software development is more of a business optimization job than a product development one - you can't spend more than you're trying to optimize, so limits for them make sense. For a product development company facing fierce competition, setting limits limits your competitive advantage. As a person, I spend nearly half of that limit on non-essential stuff just for fun and learning, but $1,500 on non-subsidized enterprise plans is literally nothing!

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

#758

Post by gizajob »

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…

I really don’t get it - why not put a Mac Studio with 128gb of ram on every engineers desk and be like “engineer, engineer your local LLM”. Makes no sense to be spending $20-30,000+ per year on cloud providers when Qwen et al are available. And even less sense to be sending all your company code and data to Anthropic and OpenAI when you can keep all that IP in the building.

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

#759

Post by LtWorf »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #754
LtWorf wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it enough of an improvement to justify the cost? (Since the current raises are probably just the beginning)

It depends :). It’s enough I pay for it for my silly side project. Historically we’ve paid a lot for software tools. IDEs and even documentation used to be pretty expensive. AI seems at least on par with those.

I've never paid for any developer tools or documentation.

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

#760

Post by fulafel »

gizajob wrote: post #758
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…

I really don’t get it - why not put a Mac Studio with 128gb of ram on every engineers desk and be like “engineer, engineer your local LLM”. Makes no sense to be spending $20-30,000+ per year on cloud providers when Qwen et al are available. And even less sense to be sending all your company code and data to Anthropic and OpenAI when you can keep all that IP in the building.

The Mac is very feeble compared to the big iron that the providers run so will be much lower performance. Also many companies would prefer engineers work on the domain problems instead of working on novel LLMs.
Post reply on HN