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Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

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Re: Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

#13

Post by morgankrey »

binwang wrote: post #5

Now I see little value in subscribing to Zed Pro compared to just bringing my own API key. Am I missing something?

(I work at Zed) No, you aren't. We care about you using Zed the editor, and we provide Zed Pro for folks who decide they'd like to support Zed or our billing model works for them. But it's simply an option, not our core business plan, and this pricing is in place to make that option financially viable for us. As long as we don't bear the cost, we don't feel the need (or the right) to put ourselves in the revenue path with LLM spend.

Re: Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

#14

Post by ebrescia »

prymitive wrote: post #12

I can imagine the near future where companies “sponsor” open source projects by donating tokens to “mine” a PR for a feature they need.

I love this! Finally a more direct way for companies to sponsor open source development. GitHub Sponsors helps, but it is often so vague where the funding is going.

Re: Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

#16

Post by Spartan-S63 »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #7

Token based pricing generally makes a lot of sense for companies like Zed, but it sure does suck for forecasting spend. Usage pricing on something like aws is pretty easy to figure out. You know what you're going to use, so you just do some simple arithmetic and you've got a pretty accurate idea. Even with serverless it's pretty easy. Tokens are so much harder, especially when using it in a development setting. It's…

> I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud FinOps.

It already is. There’s been a lot of talk and development around FinOps for AI and the challenges that come with that. For companies, forecasting token usage and AI costs is non-trivial for internal purposes. For external products, what’s the right unit economic? $/token, $/agentic execution, etc? The former is detached from customer value, the latter is hard to track and will have lots of variance.

With how variable output size can be (and input), it’s a tricky space to really get a grasp on at this point in time. It’ll become a solved problem, but right now, it’s the Wild West.

Re: Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

#17

Post by hashbig »

qsort wrote: post #11

I wonder if first-party offerings like Codex and Claude will follow suit. Most "agents" are utter nonsense, but they cooked with the CLI tools. It'd be a shame to let go of them.

Eventually that is the plan. Like we saw with Claude Code, they want developers to get a taste of that unlimited and unrestrained power of a state of the art model like Opus 4, then slowly limit usage until you fully transition to metered billing and deprecate subscription based billing.

Re: Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

#20

Post by genshii »

I'm personally looking forward to this change because I currently pay $20/month just to get edit prediction. I use Claude Code in my terminal for everything else. I do wish I could just pay for edit prediction at an even lower price, but I can understand why that's not an option.

I'm curious if they have plans to improve edit prediction though. It's honestly kind of garbage compared to Cursor, and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by calling it garbage. Most of the time it's suggestions aren't helpful, but the 10-20% of the time it is helpful is worth the cost of the subscription for me.

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