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You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

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21–30 of 92 posts

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#21
post #5

If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do) This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning tha…

> billionares use the same iPhones as you do!

Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing:

https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=...

Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#23
> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially

"Let's just make random shit up and expand it into a whole blog post."

Seriously does anyone believe this premise? The Claude Max ($200/mo) is the same kind of product as Github Copilot ($10/mo) so the price 20x-ed?

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#24

I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete. I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything. Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run. Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount…

It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.

It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.)

My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#25
post #18

Strongly disagree with the thesis. Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.

>Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months.

Yes, but every high performing open weights model coming out of China has (supposedly) been caught distilling frontier models.

It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions about the state of the open weights ecosystem based on information that may not be accurate. And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, we could see divergence between the two groups in terms of performance.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#27

I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete. I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything. Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run. Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount…

Why do you expect the price to get closer?

You can get a table from Ikea that costs a fraction of what an artisan makes. They're not the same final product but their functions is the same.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#28
traders use bloomberg terminals at $30,000/yr

they don't theoretically have to aside from that industry going that direction and the stickiness of communication through it, but it simplifies some of their job

it didn't revolutionize trading or make it more democratized, despite simplifying some aspects of the industry

the technology could have but it remains a specialized tool

thats the way I see agentic coding tools and the trend is following it

once the UX designers, PMs and ideas guys get bored of their newfound SaaS slop capabilities, it will be back to specialists doing this and nobody else

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#29
post #18

Strongly disagree with the thesis. Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.

>Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Yes, but every high performing open weights model coming out of China has (supposedly) been caught distilling frontier models. It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions about the state of the open weights ecosystem based on information that may not be accurate. And if the big labs are able to rel…

> And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation,

The big labs will not be able to reliably block distillation without further inhibiting general use of the models, which itself will help tip the balance away from commercial models.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#30
post #7

> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially WILD graph that misrepresents what is happening. There's a bunch of $20 subscriptions, and a bunch of $200 subscriptions. Devin has a $500 subscription. That's it. The cost per unit of intelligence has been dropping every month. The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course. Graphing the price of a subscr…

> The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course.

Didn’t happen for me.

On the Plus plan newer models reached the limit faster so less tasks where done until I had to wait 5 hours

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