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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

#131

Post by hendersoon »

So they're essentially charging $5/month for unlimited tab completions, when you get 2k for free. That seems reasonable, many could just not pay anything at all.

But in the paid plan they charge 10% over API prices for metered usage... and also support bring your own API. Why would anyone pay their +10%, just to be nice?

This is the same problem cursor and windsurf are facing. How the heck do you make money when you're competing with cline/roocode for users who are by definition technically sophisticated? What can you offer that's so wonderful that they can't?

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

#132

Post by shafyy »

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…

Zed is the opposite of Sublime. Zed is VC funded and will eventually be enshittified. Sublime is not and has been going strong for many years.

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

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

oblio wrote: post #130
Filligree wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> For images and videos I guess each character, creature, idea in it is a token?

No, for images, tokens would, I expect, usually be asymptotically proportional to the area of the image (this is certainly the case with input token for OpenAIs models that take image inputs; outputs are more opaque); you probably won’t have a neat one-to-one intuition for what one token represents, but you don’t need that for it to be useful and straightforward for understanding pricing, since the mathematical relationship of tokens to size can be published and the size of the image is a known quantity. (And videos conceptually could be like images with an additional dimension.)

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

#135

Post by antiframe »

jstummbillig wrote: post #52
dinobones wrote: post #42

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?

CPU/GPU time is opaque to me before I send my data, but tokens I can count before I decide to send it. That means I can verify the metering. With CPU time I send the data and then the company says "That cost X CPU units, which is $500".

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

#136

Post by jeltz »

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…

My experience with Zed was that it was a buggy mess with strange defaults. I had high hopes until I tried it but it was not even close to working for my pretty normal use case of coding C so I went back to Sublime.

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

#137

Post by jamesgeck0 »

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.

There have been improvements recently, but it still has some of the worst text rendering of any editor on macOS, if you have a non-4K display plugged in. Rendering text is kind of a big deal!

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

#138

Post by andrewmcwatters »

hu3 wrote: post #110
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18

Am I wrong in that GitHub Copilot Pro apparently has the best overall token spend when considering agentic editors?

$10 GitHub Copilot Pro plan works for me in VSCode. I've been exclusively using Claude Sonnet 4 model in VSCode and so far I've used 90% of the premium quota at the end of the months. I can always use GPT4.1 or GPT5-mini for free if need be.

Yeah, that's what I've been using since its release as well. I don't really see a point in trying the competition. It can't be better than this.

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

#139

Post by drdaeman »

morgankrey wrote: post #13
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…

I’m curious if there’s any way to completely disable/remove `zed.dev` provider from Zed, while keeping others available?
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