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

simonwillison.net

111–120 of 819 posts

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

#111

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.

The inference prices for very large open models would indicate that Antrophic's and OpenAI's margins are quite large.

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

#112
post #101

$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 s…

I startup 4 or so projects then go do other things for 4 hours. I don’t have enough energy to steer overnight, but I’m at least “semi afk” for daytime steering. So throughput is king for me, tokens per hour. Not latency or actual tokens per second.

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

#113
post #93

In my experience, this is far below the cost the average dev will incur per month so this seems very reasonable to me. And, no doubt there are exceptions for heavy users so they can get some extra token usage when they need it.

unless they changed something in the like 2 months (edit: besides implementing a cap for claude code specifically, since other tools already had caps) since ive left my job there im pretty sure 1500$ is the very max you can use after maxing out free calls, initial budget, then 2 extensions individually reviewed by your manager

higher ups pushed for these last 2 years to be AI focused so I don't think this restriction is a measure of "don't use too much AI" as much as it is a measure of "don't use only 'manual' AI tooling" since we had a dozen more specialized tools in-house running locally or otherwise that didn't count towards the budget

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

#114

> 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…

Per token costs will fall, but the harnesses will get more token hungry. Instead of just centering the div it’ll spin up a battery of agents to architect, critique, advise, code, review, refactor and so on.

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

#115
post #108

It's probabaly a good things that Uber-developers are now forced to do some coding on their own. Only use AI where it absolutely helps

Or be smarter about their usage. $50 on tokens per day can get you a long way.

Some people also take weekends off.

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

#116
post #37

How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you: 1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes 2) Review everything and point them in the right direction Large models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough. The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough atte…

> Don't ask LLMs for big changes

> Review everything and point them in the right direction

Sorry upper management doesn't care. That's an engineering problem that you need to solve.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Openrouter? i.e. Even excluding Deep Seek inference for very large open models is way cheaper. Maybe these providers are not very profitable but its highly unlikely that they are losing $4 for every $1 they make since selling inference is their only product...

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

#118
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies have more expenses than inference.

yes, and theres no evidence that they arent (or can't) use profitable inference to subsidise those other expenses. Some companies will keep spending massively to train better models, and some other companies will not, and offer good api prices. Which will end up being used? That depends on whether the spending turns into better value models

> theres no evidence that they arent (or can't) use profitable inference to subsidise those other expenses

as far as we know there's no evidence that they can produce any profits at all

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

That's just market segmentation and them trying to maximize revenue it doesen't really say anything about their costs.

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

#120

> 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…

> Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China?

I genuinely do not know how prices can get lower from the current major providers in NA without the whole market collapsing. Everyone is spending copious amounts of money to presumably make more money back.

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