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

simonwillison.net

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

#51

Post by hanzeweiasa »

ashahin wrote: post #36

[flagged]

Good point about the unit of consumption shifting from prompts to agent loops. That makes pricing even trickier for vertical-specific AI tools.

We see this firsthand building AI Workdeck (open-source AI workspace for legal teams). A single due diligence review might chain 20+ agent calls: OCR -> text extraction -> clause classification -> risk scoring -> evidence chain assembly. The user sees one action, but the backend burns through significant inference.

The interesting thing about vertical tools is the pricing model can be fundamentally different. Horizontal tools charge per seat or per token. But in legal, the value is in the document, not the seat. A lawyer reviewing a 500-page M&A file gets way more value than one reviewing a 2-page NDA.

Self-hosting changes the calculus too. Our users run on their own infra, so the AI cost is whatever their GPU costs. That makes $1,500/month caps less relevant and throughput optimization more important.

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

#52

Post by throwaw12 »

darkwater wrote: post #24
CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

> it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering... and being a bit snarky, attending Uber engineers talks here and there at a few conferences, looks like. they love to (re)invent internal tooling/platforms. That's pretty expensive on its own. EDIT: I'm not saying that Uber's engineers didn't add value to the company, they absolutely did…

you don't get promotion for supporting existing things, but for "inventing" you can get promoted. also for large migrations

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

#53

Post by nonethewiser »

jcgrillo wrote: post #20
CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

> WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? WTF did anyone build with all that spend? Despite all the feel-good anecdotes about how productive folks feel using ai coding tools there's a deafening silence when it comes to actual, demonstrated efficacy. How can we be this far entrenched in these workflows and still not know whether they actually do anything useful?

The real answer?

Software engineer quality of life.

There can be an increase in productivity without a corresponding increase in total output. The gains could be captured by software engineers doing a days work in an hour then fucking off in a variety of ways.

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

#55

Post by dkdcdev »

idiotsecant wrote: post #48
embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even license a SOTA model’s weights if you’d like Yeah, I bet all labs releasing SOTA models are more than happy to remove the main way they make money and let you run it locally, especially if you're a big spender like Uber who seems very willing to throw money into the sea as an experiment.

I don't think they'll have a choice, open weights models are not far behind. At some point it's essentially a commodity game

they also already do this…

Anthropic and OpenAI license to the public clouds. Google reportedly licenses to Apple. licensing to Fortune 100 companies running on their own infra is an obvious next step

it is a race to the bottom and I’m not sure the labs win that race. we’ll see!

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

#56

Post by simonw »

thejazzman wrote: post #23
lelanthran wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that it's not?

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

This story isn't about those subscriptions - enterprise customers like Uber are paying the full API prices.

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

#57

Post by MagicMoonlight »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #3

These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.

It's not. They recently forced enterprise customers onto API billing instead of the cheap consumer pricing. Now the pricing is brutal.

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

#58

Post by CharlieDigital »

m3kw9 wrote: post #43
CharlieDigital wrote: post #4

$1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum. Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something. 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?

You can't get an edge using local models, these guys may have competitors that will spend on SOTA models. They won't likely ever consider local machines even for some offloading scenarios, the complexity and costs will be even higher.

Consider rewiring your perspective: getting an edge doesn't really matter; the only thing that matters is will customers pay for this? Is this a useful, valuable problem to solve?

Coding faster doesn't really solve that.

Uber makes more money if people buy more rides, order more food, have some breakthrough in autonomous driving. They can save money if they can optimize some ops or spend somewhere. Is there any evidence that with the spend on AI that they achieved any of this? If they did, I'm sure we'd hear about it in some engineering blog.

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

#59

Post by darkwater »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #47
darkwater wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? You can ask the same for the median 330k salary in the US for Uber Engineering... and being a bit snarky, attending Uber engineers talks here and there at a few conferences, looks like. they love to (re)invent internal tooling/platforms. That's pretty expensive on its own. EDIT: I'm not saying that Uber's engineers didn't add value to the company, they absolutely did…

This is what all "platform engineers" have to do once things are working nicely: you have to keep inventing work. I don't know; I'm a Ron Popeil "set it and forget it" kind of guy. Make the dumbest, simplest thing that's going to work with some clear path for scaling. Then go do valuable things instead.

But most Platform Engineering teams in smaller companies (and especially non-US) add a layer on top of existing technologies. A layer that usually maps to the specific culture and idiosyncrasies of that company; a bit like the deployment flow which is usually very specifically shaped on how a company is.

But in Uber's case, they tend to reinvent lower level pieces of platform/infra.

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

#60

Post by jvanderbot »

nonethewiser wrote: post #46
jvanderbot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - the future of LLMs is like ol' windows XP+Dell. Commercialized "things" you run locally offline, co-designed with hardware, with a known productivity suite, and large businesses building the next generation thing and suite with 18mo release cycles (ish).

XP? I can see the argument for enterprise support but in that case the latest windows OS is going to be virtually free and I dont know if MS and Dell etc. would even support an XP machine. Might even be required for hardware. If no enterprise support wouldnt Linux make a lot more sense? I get that if it's offline the security downside of XP doesnt matter, and I assume XP is free, but being free doesnt really seem tha…

"Windows XP+Dell" should have been in quotes. It's similar to the way enterprise productivity software was developed, packaged co-designed with hardware, and sold on an 18mo upgrade cycle assumption. It's not literally windows xp.
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