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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

#101

Post by pqtyw »

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 since open models are a commodity.

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

#102

Post by esafak »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #32
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

I understand current Codex $20 sub is worth about $480 GPT5 api credits.

Way more. Track with https://github.com/junhoyeo/tokscale

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

#104

Post by ValentineC »

> 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 models like DeepSeek. I wonder if China's really subsidising the providers, or if inferencing costs are actually much lower, and Anthropic/OpenAI are just making sure no money's left on the table for their eventual IPOs.

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

#105

Post by ecshafer »

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.

$18k a year is a non starter in most companies. Ive seen companies balk at Intellij.

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

#106

Post by pqtyw »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #25
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?

$1.5kpm for SOTA. 128gb you run DSV4 Flash.

What's the point of running it locally though? Inference for open models is quite cheap already. They could just selfhost, anyway. The experience of running LLMs locally will be excruciatingly bad in comparison at least for the near future.

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

#107

Post by lazyasciiart »

rasbmn wrote: post #97

Uber is in the business of experimenting with robotaxis and automated food delivery. They can't say that $0 per employee is the appropriate amount for AI spending. So they capped it, perhaps in order to "send a signal" that is eagerly picked up by the AI boosters. There is no signal. Uber does not work any better since AI. They still want to promote AI, so they chose the highest number that doesn't bankrupt them so t…

Is this inside knowledge, or speculation?

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

#109

Post by lazyasciiart »

Igrom wrote: post #88
simonw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the Anthropic and OpenAI "Enterprise" plans include per-developer analytics: Anthropic: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12883420-view-usage-a... OpenAI: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10875114-workspace-analy...

I believe you might be replying to a bot account.

What makes it look like one? All their dead comments read pretty normal to me.

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

#110

Post by pqtyw »

nonethewiser wrote: post #53
jcgrillo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? WTF did anyone build with all that spend? Despite all the feel-good anecdotes about how productive folks feel using ai coding tools there's a deafening silence when it comes to actual, demonstrated efficacy. How can we be this far entrenched in these workflows and still not know whether they actually do anything useful?

The real answer? Software engineer quality of life. There can be an increase in productivity without a corresponding increase in total output. The gains could be captured by software engineers doing a days work in an hour then fucking off in a variety of ways.

> doing a days work in an hour then fucking off in a variety of ways

Until companies start hiring 5x less engineers than they did before and well.. we are clearly moving towards that direction

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