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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

#91

Post by KallDrexx »

Hamuko wrote: post #32
jsheard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the rug inevitably gets pulled on those as well. It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you use >$200 of tokens per month, and long term it's not in their interest to sell you >$200 of tokens for a flat $200.

The pricing model works as long as people (on average) think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that happening? No idea.

I don't know about for people using CC on a regular basis, but according to `ccusage`, I can trivially go over $20 of API credits in a few days of hobby use. I'd presume if you are paying for a $200 plan then you know you have heavy usage and can easily exceed that.

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

#92

Post by CharlesW »

dewey wrote: post #80
j_bum wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is my go to for large text file interaction on macOS. TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.

I have Sublime Text installed for the onlu use case of opening large files. Nothing comes close.

Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be particularly good at this: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-text-...

In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."

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

#93

Post by computerex »

vtail wrote: post #49

Prediction: the only remaining providers of AI-assisted tools in a few years will be the LLM companies themselves (think claude code, codex, gemini, future xai/Alibaba/etc.), via CLIs + integrations such as ASP. There is very little value that a company that has to support multiple different providers, such as Cursor, can offer on top of tailored agents (and "unlimited" subscription models) by LLM providers.

I don't know. Foundation models are very good, and you can get a surprising amount of mileage from them by using them with low level interfaces. But personally I think companies building development tools of the future will use LLMs to build systems with increasing capabilities. I think a lot of engineering challenges remain in scaling LLM's to take over day to day in programming, and the current tools are scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine LLMs with traditional systems engineering.

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

#94

Post by indymike »

I'm going through this with pricing for our product and the battle is:

Customer: wants predictable spend Sales/Marketing: wants an amazing product that is easy to sell (read does the mostest for the leastest) Advisors: want to see the SaaS model in all it's glory (i.e. 85% margin primarily from oversubscription of infrastructure) Finance: wants to make money and is really worried about variable costs ruining SaaS profit margin

A couple of thoughts:

1. AI-based cost is mostly variable. Also, things like messaging, phone minutes and so on are variable. Cloud expenses are also variable... There's a theme and it's different.

2. The unit of value most ai software is delivering is work that is being done by people or should be being done and is not.

3. Seems like it's time to make friends with a way to make money other than subscription pricing.

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

#95

Post by mhuffman »

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.

No one is going to give up token-based pricing. The main players can twiddle their models to make anything any amount of tokens they choose.

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

#97

Post by hu3 »

thelastbender12 wrote: post #41
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.

Sorry, how is this new pricing anything but honest? They provide an editor you can use to - optimize the context you send to the LLM services - interact with the output that comes out of them Why does not justify charging a fraction of your spend on the LLM platform? This is pretty much how every service business operates.

There's now greater incentive for Zed to stuff more content in the prompts to inflate tokens used and thus profit more. Or at least be less zealous.

This is not a new concern. And is not unique to Zed.

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

#98

Post by xrisk »

CharlesW wrote: post #92
dewey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Sublime Text installed for the onlu use case of opening large files. Nothing comes close.

Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be particularly good at this: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-text-... In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."

While I don’t know if the claim is true, you’ve linked a post from 2012…

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

#99

Post by klaussilveira »

hmokiguess wrote: post #68

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…

I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.

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

#100

Post by roto »

CharlesW wrote: post #92
dewey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Sublime Text installed for the onlu use case of opening large files. Nothing comes close.

Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be particularly good at this: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-text-... In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."

I have always found sublime to be the best at large files, well over 1gb. Since you mention bbedit, maybe this is some mac specific issue? I really don't know. But at least among people i know, opening large files has effectively become its main USP.

Should be noted that the linked post is almost 15 years old at this point too, so perhaps not the most up to date either.

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