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

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

#551

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

daemin wrote: post #540

eikenberry wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.

A key point here is open in terms of being able to download and use it, not open as knowing what data and instructions were fed into it when training. A paranoid part of me thinks that these models are all inherently biased and instructed to be pro CCP, with specific gaps in their training data related to undesirable historic events and political ideas.

Sure but that goes both ways. Any dataset has a bias. My coding doesn’t need to know about Tienamen square.

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

#552

Post by icepush » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #544

Aurornis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are data centers that use and rent out 10 year old server GPUs. They can't run larger modern models. They can't run smaller models as fast as newer servers. So their remaining market is applications where customers are okay with older, smaller models and slower performance. They have to price the service lower than competitors due to the lower performance. The older GPUs are less efficient so it costs them more…

except for you know the enterprise customers who won't change their code and will pay to run old inefficent hardware just to keep from dealing with upgrades?

They can just ask Claude to upgrade it for them, completing the circle!

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

#553

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #404

jmtulloss wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your argument that $1500 / mo is too much? Why would the engineering team not be more rigorous in their model selection given a constraint?

If you had a business task to complete that was only possible with ai and it cost you >$1500/month of work, how long would you have to delay the task so that it's cheaper long run to buy hardware and do local models? $1,500/mo * 14 months = $21,000. If local models are 14mo behind as many in HN say it may be profitable to just wait. Maybe just spend a few hundred dollars of your tokens and buy hardware piece by piece…

Nearly no one is doing anything that is “only possible with AI”. This doesn’t seem like a relevant calculation. People spend on AI as an investment in their current productivity.

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

#554

Post by dakolli » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

_matthew_ wrote: post #542

tokioyoyo wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please link me DeepSeekV4 provider that's cheaper than their official offering? And not all tasks require low latency. Also, there are a lot of competition in China. Like a lot. You might know better than me as well, but although the biggest AI-labs are based in USA, the adoption is weirdly global. Like as a general sense of what's going on - you can see AI-related ads literally everywhere in Tokyo, almost al…

Cro.ai seems to be: https://crof.ai/ Of course though they are not necessarily a viable solution for companies with security requirements etc. given it is just a single person project, but they still serve as a proof it can be done.

This costs more.

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

#555

Post by grogenaut » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #235

fragmede wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable ? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!

Just to go on record, as of today, I’m a big believer that a person that knows all that stuff is much more productive with AI-coding than a person who doesn’t. I have no idea how we can get people motivated to learn these through trial-and-error when AI coding exists though. I remember the days of spending hours on stupid bugs that AI can resolve within a minute. But I recall learning heavily from those experiences.…

yes, but a person who doesn't know any of this stuff is infinitely more productive with ai than someone who isn't when it comes to many things.

we've got product folks vibing out prototypes (not shippable but clickable) in our main front end in a few minutes to an hour. This would previously have involved 3 people and several weeks, or a ton of figma and documents to fill in the gaps. This saves weeks to months and lets them really experience the items.

Then they hand it off to someone who knows all that stuff who is also using AI and the impl also gets done faster.

The PMs are either moving infinitely faster, or at least 30x faster and not blocked constantly by others.

basically you're not comparing people who don't know much (tech) with those who do, you're comparing them before and after access to AI.

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

#556

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:25 AM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #269

saulpw wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. You can absolutely do this. It's even right most of the time.

Let's be real. Most of the time you ask an LLM "Why did you do it like this?", it responds with something along the lines of "Oops. My bad. You're right to point this out." You even have a fair chance of getting a response like that when there isn't anything wrong and the question wasn't rhetorical - which perfectly illustrates the level of the genuine understanding LLMs operate at.

So what? That doesn’t negate the value they provide.

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

#557

Post by grogenaut » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

icepush wrote: post #552

grogenaut wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except for you know the enterprise customers who won't change their code and will pay to run old inefficent hardware just to keep from dealing with upgrades?

They can just ask Claude to upgrade it for them, completing the circle!

I'd agree. but also that's too scary. and the bottleneck is the massive manual change control process since there's no automation around any of this. :)

Why take risk when you can spend money and take no risk

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

#558

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

iammrpayments wrote: post #534

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies love to waste money on that kind of service, before this website became everything about AI, every week someone would post how they saved a gazillion dollars by leaving vercel or AWS to self hosting as an example.

So you think AWS is a fad?

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

#559

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #368

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are so many. Can I start with Oracle databases?

Oracle DBs have powered enormous numbers of applications and economic value.

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

#560

Post by therealdrag0 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #381

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a service, but do you remember Scrum Masters? We had them as full time employees not so long ago. Pure fad.

Hah. Great example actually. But far less common than AI afaict.