You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
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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)
#2I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete.
I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything.
Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run.
Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount of work I would’ve had to pay $10,000/mo for. Of course I’m expecting those numbers to get closer to each other.
No VC-funded gravy train lasts forever.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#3[flagged]
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#4The one saving grace I see here is that open models are getting really good, and they're already profitable at an affordable price.
So maybe it's true you won't get "the best", but I don't think you'll be that far off.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#5If 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 that companies are incentivized to sell as many products as possible for as low a price as possible.
We're supply constrained in the short-term because demand for these AI tools is so high that TSMC and other chip manufacturers can't keep up. But long term, supply/demand will equalize and tech will continue its deflationary trend. Sure, the frontier will always require the best possible chips, but AI coding is highly competitive, and competition drives price decreases. So prices may stay high right now, but it seems unlikely to me that this will stay true long-term.
All four of the author's steelmanned arguments at the end for a price decrease seem likely to come true already: competition is intense (OAI brags about how much cheaper they are compared to Claude), OAI subsidizes open-source influencers already, companies' earnings calls all call for more investment in fabs, and we're already close to saturating all of the benchmarks used for RL!
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#6"OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors."
I've been wondering about this, that there might be a day when certain models are sold at a much higher price, like luxury cars, and only people who are willing to pay a lot of money get them. Everyone else has to settle for a cheaper LLM.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#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 subscription, without taking into account what that subscription is getting you, is poor authorship.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#8An even worst day is probably coming:
Imagine if a model ever does get scary good, would the big labs even release it for general use? You couldn't even buy it if you wanted to. Exceptions would be enterprise deals / e.g.: $AMZN niche super contracts.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#9It’s worse than this…
Companies have built entire systems of such complexity and slop that they require AI just to do the maintenance. They have fired engineers thinking they can just replace them with AI.
Well when the prices rise, they have no choice but to stay locked in, paying whatever it takes just to keep their companies running. If they stop using AI, their workforce suddenly does not have capacity to do the work required because of the layoffs. And there are not enough people to hire because people are quickly turning away from software engineering as a career. What a disaster it will be.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#10i don't entirely disagree, but
> the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo
is, imo, false. cc pro, $20 per month, gets you a lot of sonnet usage, and code review with opus (which i find very valuable, even as someone who tries to use ai little). i guess it depends how you use ai, but if you use it to plan, debug, and review, rather than having it write code, i think pro is pretty comfortable.
to add, i've seen people say these subscriptions will get far more expensive, as they're offered at a loss. but, it seems far more likely that free tiers will be degraded or disappear, as (especially for openai?) the relative number of subscribers to free users is very small, so the latter probably dominates compute time greatly. anthropic probably has a higher relative number of people who pay for claude code (and use it to its fullest), so this is probably less true. i can see pro getting less usage, and max increasing in cost.