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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

#41

Post by thelastbender12 »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #15

This whole business model of trying to shave off or arbitrage a fraction of the money going to OpenAI and Anthropic just sucks. And it seems precarious. There's no honest way to resell tokens at a profit, and everyone knows it.

Sorry, how is this new pricing anything but honest? They provide an editor you can use to - optimize the context you send to the LLM services - interact with the output that comes out of them

Why does not justify charging a fraction of your spend on the LLM platform? This is pretty much how every service business operates.

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

#42

Post by dinobones »

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.

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

#43

Post by scuff3d »

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…

Also seems like a great idea to create a business models where the companies aren't incentivised to provide the best product possible. Instead they'll want to create a product just useful enough to not drive away users, but just useless enough to temp people to go up a tier, "I'm so close, just one more prompt and it will be right this time!"

Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about Zed. I'm talking about the companies make the models.

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

#44

Post by vtail »

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.

Hm... why not tokens as reported by each LLM provider? They already handle pricing for images etc.

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

#45

Post by jermaustin1 »

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.

The problem is that tokens don't all equate to the same size. A megabyte of some random json is a LOT more tokens than a megabyte of "Moby Dick".

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

#46

Post by scuff3d »

ebrescia wrote: post #14
prymitive wrote: post #12

I can imagine the near future where companies “sponsor” open source projects by donating tokens to “mine” a PR for a feature they need.

I love this! Finally a more direct way for companies to sponsor open source development. GitHub Sponsors helps, but it is often so vague where the funding is going.

If companies want to help they can just... I don't know... give projects some money

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by scuff3d »

AbuAssar wrote: post #34

Zed and Warp were two promising Rust-based projects that I closely monitor. Currently, both projects are progressing towards becoming a generic AI Agentic code platform.

Until now I've never really come across a comment on Hackernews I thought was AI generated...

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

#49

Post by vtail »

Prediction: the only remaining providers of AI-assisted tools in a few years will be the LLM companies themselves (think claude code, codex, gemini, future xai/Alibaba/etc.), via CLIs + integrations such as ASP.

There is very little value that a company that has to support multiple different providers, such as Cursor, can offer on top of tailored agents (and "unlimited" subscription models) by LLM providers.

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

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

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: 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 to actual compute cost drivers for that architecture are likely but... even that isn’t likely to be bytes.)

> Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different.

That’s a reason for incumbents to prefer not to switch, though, not a reason for them to switch.

> Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed.

More likely they would be in floatint point operations expended processing them, but using tokens (which are the primary drivers for the current LLM architectures) will probably continue as long as the architecture itself is doninant.

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