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

#791

Post by jeron » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 1:13 AM UTC

ValentineC wrote: post #104

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers. Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China? Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight mode…

personal take? token prices are a race to the bottom, as long as open source models remain competitive. that's why OSS is so important

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

#792

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

cube00 wrote: post #775

simonw wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asset I most value is my credibility. The reason so many people read my writing and find it useful is that they see me as a credible source of information: in a world full of clickbait and misinformation, I have a reputation for providing an independent voice that occupies that rare middle ground between "AI will kill us all" doomerism and "AI will solve everything" hype. Credibility is hard to earn and easy to s…

> I don't think so, but the whole point of "subconsciously" is you don't know for sure. I provide ad-hoc consulting and training services to a number of different companies and organizations. If any of those represent a conflict of interest with my writing here I will disclose that in the relevant post. [1] "you don't know for sure" is why you shouldn't be your own arbiter of what represents a conflict of interest. […

Sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Could you clarify?

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

#793

Post by ashdksnndck » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

andwur wrote: post #569

bunderbunder wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom. e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at w…

The AI pundits often seem to apply the logic that code output is directly proportional to revenue and/or profit, and as such it follows that an AI usage increase leads to more code which leads to more revenue. I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google i…

The unlocked economic activity won’t come from a Google competitor writing code faster. A lot of it will come from “boring” businesses who could benefit from custom software but haven’t had the means to create it themselves. In some cases they may not even know their problem can be solved by software, but some AI they are using for repetitive tasks will notice and offer to build an app for them.

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

#794

Post by ashdksnndck » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

samat wrote: post #651

ashdksnndck wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of econom…

I am yet to see that ‘companies with great ideas which simply cannot afford those very expensive developers’. For the most, issue is not programmer costs. Mostly it’s inability to formulate the MVP which makes sense. ‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can…

Can you believe that the barrier to entry on a $20 Claude subscription is lower than emailing a guy to hire a team for a project you haven’t even thought of yet? Regular people who are using AI to assist with their daily work will find the chatbot offering to build software tools to automate the work for them.

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

#795

Post by danans » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

eclipticplane wrote: post #495

danans wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction? It probably allowed them to avoid hiring as many people to build a certain amount of software. Even if it didn't increase revenue, it could have lowered human labor costs. > 128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Don't forget the energy costs. Searching around, advanced models use an average of 25 Wh/1000Tok.…

How much more software does Uber need? Unless they are iteratively replacing expensive vendors and optimizing other headcount costs?

> How much more software does Uber need? > Unless they are iteratively replacing expensive vendors and optimizing other headcount costs?

Yes and yes. Also the world changes and software has to evolve to model that change, especially at a place like Uber whose software models phenomena in the real world.

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

#796

Post by cube00 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #792

cube00 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think so, but the whole point of "subconsciously" is you don't know for sure. I provide ad-hoc consulting and training services to a number of different companies and organizations. If any of those represent a conflict of interest with my writing here I will disclose that in the relevant post. [1] "you don't know for sure" is why you shouldn't be your own arbiter of what represents a conflict of interest. […

Sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Could you clarify?

Ideally it would follow the same model as politicians. All entities you receive payment from over a threshold amount from would be published so it's up to the public to decide if a conflict of interest exists.

Under the current approach you could be subconsciously influenced by a consulting experience and not realise it when you write an indirectly related post.

You could reasonably argue you shouldn't be held to such a high standard, which is fine, you're not in public office.

However readers need to be clear they are entirely relying on you to self assess your own conflict of interest which can be challenging because "the whole point of "subconsciously" is you don't know for sure"

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

#797

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

cube00 wrote: post #796

simonw wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't understand the point you're making here. Could you clarify?

Ideally it would follow the same model as politicians. All entities you receive payment from over a threshold amount from would be published so it's up to the public to decide if a conflict of interest exists. Under the current approach you could be subconsciously influenced by a consulting experience and not realise it when you write an indirectly related post. You could reasonably argue you shouldn't be held to suc…

Yeah, that's fair.

I hope to earn enough trust from my long-term readers that "I'll let you know if o have a conflict of interest" is good enough for them.

I write about contentious topics, so some people will never be satisfied that I'm not a paid shill of some kind. It gets to me because I value my credibility so much, but eventually I just need to accept that some people won't ever trust me and there's nothing I can do to win them over.

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

#798

Post by Frieren » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 5:45 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #765

Frieren wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jeff Bezos made the salient point... Big AI investor tells us that investing in AI is good. Oh, the surprise! Does that invalidate this point? Yes. Because it makes no sense. The big money is not going to R&D but to build infrastructure that will be outdated in 5 years.

No, that's not the right read. He said bubbles and exuberance still produce lasting value for humanity, even when investors lose money. Big money is going to build infrastructure which is fundamentally required for R&D. They aren't separate, they are the same thing. It sounds like you're complaining that Pfizer isn't investing in drug research, they are buying mass spectrometers and micron fidelity microscopes. Same…

> bubbles and exuberance still produce lasting value for humanity

Citation needed:

Bubbles destroy value, assign resources to wasteful endeavors. Just look at the financial bubble of 2008. So many people lost their jobs, so much money was moved from the average worker pocket to banks, people lost their homes, etc.

A focus on construction will have provided millions with homes, a focus on finance and money stole them of it.

The .com bubble wasted billions in bogus projects and scams. The web didn't became to improve until after the money run out and competition between companies took over.

> Big money is going to build infrastructure which is fundamentally required for R&D.

That is never true. Big money extracts value from society. It is the small investors, pension funds, etc. that move the economy. It is everyday's working class spending. It is educated people pursuing their passion that creates value.

Big money are parasites that steal from society. That pee-in-a-bottle Bezos is trying to convince people of the opposite is unsurprising.

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

#799

Post by dgellow » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #738

dgellow wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One aspect Paul Kedrosky mentioned recently is the concept of „duration mismatch“. The price per token goes down over time (either because the AI vendor reduces due to competition pressure, or because customers are now incentivized to use older cheaper models). But datacenters are financed through debt, with the assumption their revenue increases over time. Quoting him: „[AI vendors are] paying for a fixed cost with…

Relative to the current usage demand for tokens is effectively unlimited. If the price of tokens go down people will send more tokens to compensate. We are very very far away from a cost per token where people run out of things they want to send through an LLM.

You’re describing the issue. The problem isn’t that datacenters are under utilized, it’s that they are used to generate something that has a value going down over time, while being financed through debt with the assumption their revenue grow over time. That’s where you have a mismatch.

To simplify let’s assume a given datacenter can generate a fixed number of token per second (in reality that depends on the model tokenizer, and other model specific factors). And let’s say it is used at full capacity, split between inference and training. If people are mostly using the frontier models the datacenter might be profitable, with enough margin to cover training of future frontier model, operating costs, and repay the debt used for construction.

However if the token price goes down and the demand doesn’t change you now risk to run the datacenter at loss, with risk to not be able to repay your debt.

If price reduce and demands increase, you can reduce the part dedicated to training, but eventually run the datacenter at full capacity to generate tokens that are becoming less and less valuable over time

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

#800

Post by jurgenburgen » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

SoMomentary wrote: post #727

jurgenburgen wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use a local model to log everything I do all week to automate my timesheet. Isn’t that just more work than logging it yourself?

Not at all! My company has 100s of clients and we track time in 6 minute increments. I feed in my browser history, terminal logs, session scripts, calendar, git commits, etc etc into it and voila it produces a highly accurate timesheet in no time flat. Automating it has been way better for me than the alternative of breaking my flow whenever I'm switching tasks to chart my time, or logging all my hours for the week i…

> My company has 100s of clients and we track time in 6 minute increments.

That’s an insane level of detail and I can understand why it makes sense to use an LLM to remove that busywork, otherwise you’d be spending half of your time on this bureaucracy.

For the company I would imagine it could be more cost efficient to stop being so onerous instead of burning tokens.