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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

#81

Post by inerte »

genshii wrote: post #20

I'm personally looking forward to this change because I currently pay $20/month just to get edit prediction. I use Claude Code in my terminal for everything else. I do wish I could just pay for edit prediction at an even lower price, but I can understand why that's not an option. I'm curious if they have plans to improve edit prediction though. It's honestly kind of garbage compared to Cursor, and I don't think I'm b…

That's been my workflow also. Claude Code / OpenAI Codex most of the time, when I have to edit files Cursor's auto-complete is totally worth the $20.

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

#82

Post by AbuAssar »

scuff3d wrote: post #48
AbuAssar wrote: post #34

Zed and Warp were two promising Rust-based projects that I closely monitor. Currently, both projects are progressing towards becoming a generic AI Agentic code platform.

Until now I've never really come across a comment on Hackernews I thought was AI generated...

You are partially right, after I wrote the comment I used the writing tools in macOS to rewrite it in a professional tone.

The wording may sound AI generated but the gist of the comment is my true opinion

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

#83

Post by morgankrey »

oakesm9 wrote: post #70
morgankrey wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now live: https://zed.dev/pricing#what-is-a-token. Thanks for the feedback

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

#84

Post by travisgriggs »

I love this for Zed. I hate that I’m going to have deal with the model providers more directly. Because I don’t know what tokens are.

It’s like if McDonalds changed their pricing model to be some complex formula involving nutrition properties (calories, carbs, etc) plus some other things (carbon tax, local state taxes, whatever) and moved to a pay as you bite model. You start eating a Big Mac, but every bite has different content proportions, so every bite is changing in price as you go. Only through trial and error would you figure out how to eat. And the fact that the “complex formula” is prone to real time change at any point, makes it impossible to get excited about eating.

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

#86

Post by oblio »

dragonwriter wrote: post #50
dinobones wrote: post #42

Making this prediction now, LLM pricing will eventually be priced in bytes. Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different. Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed. Just like bandwidth. I'm surprised this hasn't already happened.

> Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be. (If models also switch architecture and multimodal diffusion models, say, become more common, then, sure, a different pricing model more tied t…

> For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be.

In classical computing, there is a clear hierarchy: text Is there a reason why video computing using LLMs shouldn't be much more intensive and therefore costly than text or image output?

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

#87

Post by oblio »

hamandcheese wrote: post #75
giancarlostoro wrote: post #60

I was just thinking this morning about how I think Zed should rethink their subscription because its a bit pricey if they're going to let you just use Claude Code. I am in the process of trying out Claude and figured just going to them for the subscriptions makes more sense. I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your devs to look a…

> I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser? This is her another reason why CLI-based coding agents will win. Every editor out there trying to be the middle man between you and an AI provider is nuts.

Wouldn't the last step just be an API? That would allow direct integration from everywhere.

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

#88

Post by rdtsc »

I am wondering why they couldn't have foreseen this. Was it really a failure to predict the need to charge for tokens eventually, or was planned from the start that way -- get people to use the unlimited option for a bit, they get hooked, then switch them to per-token subscriptions.

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

#89

Post by mrcwinn »

acaloiar wrote: post #77

Tokens are an implementation detail that have no business being part of product pricing. It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value". When the value customers rece…

Doesn’t prompt pricing obfuscate token costs by definition? I guess the alternative is everyone pays $500/mo. (And you’d still get more value than that.)

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

#90

Post by sippeangelo »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #67
sippeangelo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I agree. I wish they focused more on it. I'd love to be able to give it a few sentences of instructions to make it even more effective for me. It's so much more of a productivity boon than all the coding agent stuff ever was.
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