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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

#61

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

But the reason LLMs aren't used to build features isn't because they are expensive.

The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with, what kind of other components can be extended to support it, (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.

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

#62

Post by potlee »

scuff3d wrote: post #43
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 compani…

While Apple is incentivized to ship a smaller battery to cut costs, it is also incentivized to make their software efficient as possible to make the best use of the battery they do ship

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

#63

Post by Lalabadie »

Havoc wrote: post #38
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.

>There's no honest way to resell tokens at a profit, and everyone knows it. Agree with the sentiment, but I do think there are edge cases. e.g. I could see a place like openrouter getting away with a tiny fractional markup based on the value they provide in the form of having all providers in one place

The issue with a model like this (fixed small percentage) is that your biggest clients are the most incentivized to move away.

At scale, OpenRouter will instead get you the lower high-volume fees they themselves get from their different providers.

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

#67

Post by hombre_fatal »

sippeangelo wrote: post #54
morgankrey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah, Cursor tab completion is basically in the realm of magical mind reading and might still be the most insane productivity demonstration of LLM tech in software.

It obsoleted making Vim macros and multiline editing for example. Now you just make one change and the LLM can derive the rest; you just press tab.

It's interesting that the Cursor team's first iteration is still better than anything I've seen in their competitors. It's been an amazing moat for a year(?) now.

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

#68

Post by hmokiguess »

Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there.

Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me work on it.

I then tried opening this 1GB text file to do a simple find/replace on it only to find macOS run out of system memory with Zed quickly using 20gb of memory for that search operation.

I then switched to vscode, which, granted opened it in a buffered sort of way and limited capability, but got the job done.

Maybe that was a me issue I don’t know, but aside from this one-off, it doesn’t have a good extensions support in the community for my needs yet. I hope it gets there!

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

#69

Post by dinvlad »

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.

The whole business model even for OAI/Anthropic is unsustainable.. they are already running it at a huge loss atm, and will do for the foreseeable future. The economics simply doesn't work, unfortunately or not

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

#70

Post by oakesm9 »

morgankrey wrote: post #55
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.

All makes sense. I presumed it was an oversight.

It’s hard for me to conceptualise what a million tokens actually looks like, but I don’t think there’s a way around that aside from making proving some concrete examples of inputs, outputs, and the number of tokens that actually is. I guess it would become clearer after using it a bit.

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