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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

#111

Post by bombcar »

klaussilveira wrote: post #99
hmokiguess wrote: post #68

Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there. Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me…

I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.

If the full magnitude of products that stopped working on the main product and started to try to shoehorn AI in was known, the economy would collapse overnight.

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

#112

Post by jopsen »

Hamuko wrote: post #32
jsheard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the rug inevitably gets pulled on those as well. It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month, and long term it's not in their interest to sell you >$200 of tokens for a flat $200.

The pricing model works as long as people (on average) think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that happening? No idea.

It's probably easier (and hence, cheaper) to finance the AI infrastructure investments if you have a lot of recurring subscriptions.

There is probably a lot of value in predictability. Meaning it might be visible for a $200, to offer more tokens than $200.

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

#113

Post by chewz »

genshii wrote: post #20

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 b…

I have never used Zed predictions but $20 for 500 prompts is quite a good deal. I use it mostly with Opus for some hard cases.

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

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

oblio wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be. (If models also switch architecture and multimodal diffusion models, say, become more common, then, sure, a different pricing model more tied t…

> For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be. In classical computing, there is a clear hierarchy: text Is there a reason why video computing using LLMs shouldn't be much more intensive and therefore costly than text or image output?

No, it'll certainly be more expensive in any conceivable model that handles all three modalities, but if the model uses an architecture like current autoregressive, token-based multimodal LLMs/VLMs, tokens will make just as much sense as the basis for pricing, and be similarly straightforward, as with text and images.

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

#115

Post by coder543 »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #79
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…

My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the vendor...."the house always wins" https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

There are enough vendors that it's difficult for any one vendor to charge too much per token. There are also a lot of really good open-weight models that your business could self-host if the hosted vendors all conspire to charge too much per token. (I believe it's only economical to self-host big models if you're using a lot of tokens, so there is a breakeven point.)

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

#116

Post by hakanensari »

klaussilveira wrote: post #99
hmokiguess wrote: post #68

Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there. Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me…

I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.

I think their recent push to delegate to CLI agents in the agent panel is the right direction. Claude Code has been running in Zed for the past month. Sure, there are SDK limitations and kinks to iron out, but it’s moving quickly. I’m into it.

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

#117

Post by sellyme »

jsheard wrote: post #21
prasoon2211 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is partially why, at least for LLM-assisted coding workloads, orgs are going with the $200 / mo Claude Code plans and similar.

Until the rug inevitably gets pulled on those as well. It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month, and long term it's not in their interest to sell you >$200 of tokens for a flat $200.

> It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month

This is only true if you can find someone else selling them at cost.

If a company has a product that cost them $150, but they would ordinarily sell piecemeal for a total of $250, getting a stable recurring purchase at $200 might be worthwhile to them while still being a good deal for the customer.

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

#118

Post by hmokiguess »

j_bum wrote: post #76
hmokiguess wrote: post #68

Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there. Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me…

VSCode is my go to for large text file interaction on macOS. TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.

Speaking of TextEdit, I like what the folks at CodeEdit are doing. They are moving slow and focusing on just the core parts. Maybe I should go give them a try too!

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

#119

Post by torben-friis »

bombcar wrote: post #111
klaussilveira wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.

If the full magnitude of products that stopped working on the main product and started to try to shoehorn AI in was known, the economy would collapse overnight.

It really is concerning. I keep an excel sheet with links of all companies I could apply to whenever i change jobs, and checking it the other day practically every row was now selling an ai product.

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

#120

Post by praseodym »

oblio wrote: post #87
hamandcheese wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser? This is her another reason why CLI-based coding agents will win. Every editor out there trying to be the middle man between you and an AI provider is nuts.

Wouldn't the last step just be an API? That would allow direct integration from everywhere.

There is one, developed by the Zed team in collaboration with Gemini. And Claude Code is also supported now.

https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/introduction

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