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You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

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61–70 of 92 posts

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#61
post #5

If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do) This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning tha…

> competition drives price decreases This is something that is often cited as trueism, but there is no natural laws which makes this a necessary true. There is plenty of room for black swans in market laws. So much so that the term black swan is probably better known in the field of economy then any other field. Competition may drive down the price of LLMs, however there is a greater then zero probability that it won…

I can't think of any high volume/consumer electronics/computer technology that has not been driven down in price over time. So based on historical precedent, I think your "greater than zero probability" might be only a tiny bit greater than zero.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#62
This is very early.

If there is an AI boom, what we're seeing is its infancy. Semi-autonomous coding is the first and most natural use case, thanks to vast amount of training material, opportunities for closed-loop RL with minimal human supervision and the eagerness of the community to try and embrace new tools.

But it is still not much more than QoL improvement at this stage, and maybe some velocity gains for the most hardcore users willing to spend time and money to stay at the bleeding edge.

But there is also a rather large appetite for local models, I am not sure the future of AI will be 100% cloud based.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#63
post #21
post #5

If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do) This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning tha…

> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.

It is still exactly the same iPhone tech-wise, just with a custom "case".

I wouldn't go as far to call it "brain disease" though: in a sense, it is OK for someone well off to spend on expensive products (made by less rich), so things would equalize at least a bit.

Just like we in IT might happily pay 3% of our salary on slightly better shoes, and someone else would claim we have a "brain disease" because you can get perfectly good shoes for 5x less money.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#64
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.

I guess billionaires don't charge wirelessly. They just grab their backup custom iphone when the first one dies.

They've got someone carrying their battery packs with an extendable cable.

Or maybe Big Ben hides the charging coils too.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#65
post #7

> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially WILD graph that misrepresents what is happening. There's a bunch of $20 subscriptions, and a bunch of $200 subscriptions. Devin has a $500 subscription. That's it. The cost per unit of intelligence has been dropping every month. The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course. Graphing the price of a subscr…

I mean when it equated the $10 a month Copilot to Claude Max, I stopped taking the article seriously.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#66
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.

I guess billionaires don't charge wirelessly. They just grab their backup custom iphone when the first one dies.

[deleted]

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#67
I was continually hitting quota on the $20/mo Claude sub. I started doing the "pay for extra tokens" thing when I did hit it, but just upgrading proved to be far more cost effective. I upgraded to the $200/mo Max subscription and have been using almost exclusively Opus and barely get to 25% quota in any session (a couple times I got over 50% but I was having it go wild in concurrent sessions). I could probably downgrade to the $100/mo one and be fine, though.

Sounds like a lot, but in the few weeks I've had it, I was able to complete two projects I had given up on due to not having time in the past. I re-jiggered some other monthly subscriptions so the net cost wasn't ultimately that much more than what I was paying previously. I also weighed it against buying something like a DGX Spark for local inference, but ultimately I don't want to mess with serving models (and the ones available just aren't as good, realistically), I just want a good one that works.

I probably can't justify much more than $200/mo, but for what I get out of it, I'm happy to pay it. I've done more in the past few weeks on side projects than I had in a couple years.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#68
I expect that in the "post scarcity" world where the capital class doesn't need majority of human labor for anything most people will be priced out of everything. Including the basic necessities.

But sure, lets just keep automating ourselves out of jobs (and help other industries do it too) with no plan as to how to help all the displaced people.

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#69
post #48
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or ad-supported LLMs where you can't guarantee the answer isn't sponsored.

Why doesn't the same caveat apply to a paid account? I mean, you have to declare when content is an advert, and if you are asserting that the owners of the chatbot are going to just ignore that requirement, won't they just do the same thing for paid accounts?

I would assume they would until the profit of subscriptions surpasses the profit of anything else they can monetize. Why would they leave money on the table?

Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

#70
post #63
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.

It is still exactly the same iPhone tech-wise, just with a custom "case". I wouldn't go as far to call it "brain disease" though: in a sense, it is OK for someone well off to spend on expensive products (made by less rich), so things would equalize at least a bit. Just like we in IT might happily pay 3% of our salary on slightly better shoes, and someone else would claim we have a "brain disease" because you can get…

That iphone is not 5x more.

Furthermore, who in IT is paying 3% on shoes? Even if you’re the hypebeast buying $1200 Balenciagas, I don’t see how the math works out.

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