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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

#51

Post by oakesm9 »

I completely get why this pricing is needed and it seems fair. There’s a major flaw in the announcement though.

I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not clear:

- Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both?

- What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it varies by model and is “ API list price +10%”, but nowhere does it say what these API list prices are. Am I meant to go to The OpenAI, Anthropic, and other websites to get that pricing information? Shouldn’t that be in a table on that page which each hosted model listed?

—

I’m only a very casual user of AI tools so maybe this is clear to people deep in this world, but it’s not clear to me just based on Zelda pricing page exactly how far $5 per month will get me.

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

#52

Post by jstummbillig »

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?

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

#53

Post by drakythe »

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.

Unless companies also donate money to sponsor the code review that will be required to be done by real human being I could see this idea being a problem for maintainers. Yes you have to code review a human being as well but a human being is capable of learning and carrying that learning forward and their next PR will be better, as well as being able to look at past PRs to evaluate whether the user is a troll/bad actor or someone who genuinely wants to assist with the project. An LLM won't learn and will always spit out valid _looking_ code.

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

#54

Post by sippeangelo »

morgankrey wrote: post #22
genshii wrote: 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…

We have a significant investment underway in edit predictions. We hear you, more soon.

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

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

#55

Post by morgankrey »

oakesm9 wrote: post #51

I completely get why this pricing is needed and it seems fair. There’s a major flaw in the announcement though. I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not clear: - Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both? - What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it varies by model and is “ API list price +10%”, but now…

List here: https://zed.dev/docs/ai/models. Thanks for the feedback, we'll make sure this is linked from the pricing page. Think it got lost in the launch shuffle.

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

#56

Post by bananapub »

seems fine - they're aligning their prices with their costs.

presumably everyone is just aiming or hoping for inference costs to go down so much that they can do a unlimited-with-tos like most home Internet access etc, because this intermediate phase of having to count your pennies to ask the matrix multiplier questions isn't going to be very enjoyable or stable or encourage good companies to succeed.

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

#57

Post by hombre_fatal »

Hamuko wrote: post #32
jsheard wrote: 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.

The pricing model works as long as people (on average) think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that happening? No idea.

Well, the $200/mo plan model works as long as people on the $100/mo plan is insufficient for some people which works as long as the $17/mo plan is insufficient for some people.

I don't see how it matters to you that you aren't saturating your $200 plan. You have it because you hit the limits of the $100/mo plan.

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

#58

Post by baq »

jsheard wrote: post #21
prasoon2211 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is partially why, at least for LLM-assisted coding workloads, orgs are going with the $200 / mo Claude Code plans and similar.

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

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

#59

Post by drakythe »

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.

For companies where that is their entire business model I absolutely agree. Zed is a solid editor with additional LLM integration features though, so this move would seem to me to just cover their costs + some LLM integration development funds. If their users don't want to use the LLM then no skin off Zed's back unless they've signed some guaranteed usage contract.

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

#60

Post by giancarlostoro »

I was just thinking this morning about how I think Zed should rethink their subscription because its a bit pricey if they're going to let you just use Claude Code. I am in the process of trying out Claude and figured just going to them for the subscriptions makes more sense.

I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your devs to look at different code files and discuss them. I might still pay for Zed's subscription in order to support them long term regardless.

I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser?

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