Live data from Hacker News

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

zed.dev

121–130 of 205 posts

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

#121

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.

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.

I get what you are saying, and I think they are doing a good job there as well. That said, it still feels like something is missing in that whole workflow to me.

I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason. Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.

Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more deliberately.

I still see Agents as something that will be more like a background thread that yields rather than a first class citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.

I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable watching it breathe. — am I using it wrong? Should I be leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different file and task while it's doing its thing?

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one thing keeping me from switching from Cursor. I much prefer Zed in every other way. Exciting!

Yeah, Cursor tab completion is basically in the realm of magical mind reading and might still be the most insane productivity demonstration of LLM tech in software. It obsoleted making Vim macros and multiline editing for example. Now you just make one change and the LLM can derive the rest; you just press tab. It's interesting that the Cursor team's first iteration is still better than anything I've seen in their co…

I could say the same about the AI-assisted autocomplete in IDEA. Wonder how they compare...

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience: I added a folder to my zed project that was too big, causing zed to lock up and eventually crash. But because the default setting was to re-open projects on launch, I was stuck in a loop where I couldn’t remove the folder either. Eventually found a way to clear the recent projects, load an empty editor, and change the setting to avoid it in the future.

Ok, how big was your project? My JetBrains IDEs (RustRover, Goland) probably would have choked out too.

You can open large codebases in Jetbrains IDEs and it takes forever to index, but it shouldn't outright crash or completely freeze.

You can open the kernel in CLion. Don't expect the advanced refactoring features to work, but it can deal with a ~40 million lines project folder for example

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

#125
post #76

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.

Vscode has a special optimizations in place for large files. That's why it works so good.

You can actually disable it in the settings if you want it to try and render the entire thing at once

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

#126
post #58
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.

meanwhile me hiding from accounting for spending $500 on cursor max mode in a day

Did you actually get 500 bucks worth of work out of it?

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

#127

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…

Similar experience: I added a folder to my zed project that was too big, causing zed to lock up and eventually crash. But because the default setting was to re-open projects on launch, I was stuck in a loop where I couldn’t remove the folder either. Eventually found a way to clear the recent projects, load an empty editor, and change the setting to avoid it in the future.

Big files/projects is where Sublime really shines. I hope Zed can replicate that performance.

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

#128

Making this prediction now, LLM pricing will eventually be priced in bytes. Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different. Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed. Just like bandwidth. I'm surprised this hasn't already happened.

Why this instead of cpu/gpu time?

I'm assuming token count and usage is pretty closely tied

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

#129
post #113
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.

10 bucks on copilot and you get unlimited + unlimited gpt4.1 etc

Copilot is the best value by far

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

#130
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Of course it’s more expensive. It’s still tokens, but considerably more of them.

That's the thing, I can't visualize (and I don't think most people can) what "tokens" represent for image or video outputs.

For text I just assume them to be word stems or more like work-family-members (cat-feline-etc).

For images and videos I guess each character, creature, idea in it is a token? Blue sky, cat walking around, gentleman with a top hat, multiplied by the number of frames?

Post reply on HN