Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

471–480 of 819 posts

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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…

Using a shittier model is just more work for the user, I’m not sure why anyone does it, unless they’re playing with it like a toy.

I sometimes let Claude Opus create plans, DeepSeek v4 pro implements and writes tests. Claude reviews and corrects.

Saves like $2-3 per session. Same quality code.

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

#472
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time if you're copying code from one place to another what you actually want to do is abstract it so you can reuse it in both places. The LLM can easily do this type of stuff, just tell it and it'll happily do it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell people they need to work closer with the AI, tell it how to do things. Don't just tell it what to do and get frustrated when it does it differently than…

Nah the codebase is legacy fucked and I cant be bothered to try and optimize business flows without the fear of other stuff breaking. Claude 100% of the time even thinks we use laravel despite the project being some old lumen codebase, so most of laravels features are not available. It also gets the PHP version we are using wrong 100% of the time.

Have you tried adding this information to claude.md so it knows?

I also think your excuse is bad. "The code is legacy fucked so I'll just legacy fuck it some more because I can't be bothered to make an effort"

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

#473
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 30 million software developers. At least that's what a quick web search says.

It is not only for devs https://openai.com/index/codex-for-every-role-tool-workflow/

So, are companies paying that amount for people at other roles to use it?

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every employee doesn't need $1k in token spend per month, either. That kind of spend makes sense for technical workers in r+d. Most other workers are served fine by $20-30 worth of tokens on a budget model. You don't need Opus to help support write emails.

No, but you do want Opus-tier models to do desktop and office software automation (think about people who intensely use Excel and the like). Actually those might take even more tokens that coding in a lot of cases. Why do you think Claude Cowork is successful, and why do you think Codex is leaning so hard into Computer use?

I wonder if you will see app makers begin to open APIs (MCPs) up in ways that replace computer use. Computer use via human interfaces is pretty hacky IME, and if you can use an app that exposes spreadsheets in a way that reduces token costs by 90%.

I'm optimistic that the demand for AI accessibility will drive programmatic interfaces in places where companies were previously reluctant to.

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

#475

> 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…

They're going to need to bring in a few trillion dollars fast to meet wall street expectations. Expect prices to rise.

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

#476

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs. I…

I’ve even heard the rule “twice the salary” being used here in EU, but the tax and insurance burden may be higher. All kinds of those are based primarily on total payroll amount.

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

#477

> 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…

Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high. > Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to p…

China is the worst trading partner in the world. They banned most companies from functioning in their country for decades

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, they'll just lobby to ban Chinese models instead to keep their token revenues high. > Compounding the problem, labs in China often release dual-use capable models as open-weight. Once a model is open-weight, safeguards that do exist can be removed, making the model available to any state or non-state actor to use for malicious purposes, including the cyber and CBRN misuse those safeguards were built to p…

China is the worst trading partner in the world. They banned most companies from functioning in their country for decades

[dead]

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

#479
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.

Oracle and some company wide Microsoft licenses.

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

#480

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs. I…

I’ve even heard the rule “twice the salary” being used here in EU, but the tax and insurance burden may be higher. All kinds of those are based primarily on total payroll amount.

[dead]
Post reply on HN