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

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

#71

Post by barrkel »

reenorap wrote: post #36

I predicted months ago that $20/month isn't going to fly anymore. I think if it produces code, it will jump to $1000/month at least. The value of the LLM nowadays is much higher than $1000/month and I think we will see that happen in 2026, because these companies need to make money ASAP in order to get more funding for the next round of training.

Demand (value created) isn't enough to make prices rise. You need supply to be constrained. If there was only one competent coding model, I'd be worried. But between competition and open weight models, we're not looking constrained on the supply side any time soon.

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

#72

Post by relaxing »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #41

None of this matters. Open weights will continue to be released. I don't need to have the absolute greatest LLM. I run Qwen3 locally and that's not even the best Qwen.

How’s that going for you? Honestly, I’d like to read a review.

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

#73

Post by barrkel »

bambax wrote: post #46

It's possible that prices will go up (although the cost of pure inference tends to go down; the question is more how to amortize the cost of training new models). But this is absurd: > the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo If you pay by the token instead of with a subscription, and don't send the entirety of your code base with each request, costs are ridiculously low. Like, $50 will last a minimum of 3…

$50 will last you a good long time if you don't use many tokens, and you are judicious about which model you use, and don't need web search much.

However, on a fixed price plan your behavior changes. It's a qualitative change in how you work, rather than quantitative. Ideation and product design and specification start becoming bottlenecks.

I started out the API route. I started spending $100 a month once I was spending upawards of $10 in tokens a session.

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

#74

Post by necovek »

relaxing wrote: post #70
necovek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That iPhone is 15x more (I don't know the exact price, sorry)? Same order of magnitude.

3% of your monthly salary for $200-$500 shoes (I see plenty amateur runners getting carbon sole shoes in this price range, for instance), when you could get a pair for less than $50.

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

#75

Post by orthogonal_cube »

skybrian wrote: post #24
orthogonal_cube wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.

It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.) My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.

I agree that consumer goods normally get cheaper over time. Software that becomes commercialized, or sees a surge in enterprise demand, tends to go the other way. Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Slack for example.

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

#76

Post by runarberg »

beachy wrote: post #61
runarberg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

xkcd did one about graphic calculators

https://xkcd.com/768/

But other that comes to mind are MRI scanners, superconductors, quantum computers.

I think in general this market law is subject to selection bias. The technology which does decrease in price will become commonplace and easy to find, whereas the technology which doesn’t risks becoming obscure and maybe even removed from consumer markets.

EDIT: just to clarify, the point about black swans is that the prediction is always close to 0 probability of the existence of black swans, until we actually observe one, then the probability is suddenly exactly 1. If LLMs are a black swan for this market law, most people will assign a close to 0 probability ... until they don’t.

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

#78

Post by Leynos »

pluc wrote: post #69
Leynos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So "ad-supported" is redundant in your comment since you believe it applies to the paid accounts too?

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

#79

Post by overgard »

floatrock wrote: post #49
overgard wrote: post #35

I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!

That just sounds like "controlling the means of production" with more clever wordplay.

Not really. The "means of production" in software has basically been free (other than the cost of a computer) for like 20+ years.

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

#80

Post by trcf23 »

overgard wrote: post #35

I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!

Yet most people seem to agree that AI favours skilled dev more than unskilled ones...
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