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Comments (257)

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  ValentineC
  > 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 models like DeepSeek. I wonder if China's really subsidising the providers, or if inferencing costs are actually much lower, and Anthropic/OpenAI are just making sure no money's left on the table for their eventual IPOs.
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  tuesdaynight
  Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?
• siliconc0w
  I use the $100/mo sub but my 30 day API cost is about $1700/mo.It really depends how you use it, if you're using prompts to generate detailed designs, breaking those into lists of tasks, and then feeding those to multiple agents - it's really easy to burn through many thousands.If you're being more deliberate and using a few agents at a time interactively, having it review PRs/resolve issues, automated clean-ups and performance optimization, etc it could be more like $1500.If you're just throwing it one-off questions like a better stack-overflow that is well under a $100.I've really gotten into /goal, if you can find something verifiable and leave it overnight - it's kinda like christmas morning to see where it landed.
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  john01dav
  Why isn't self hosting (even just renting a GPU server, not necessarily on premise) at large companies or hosting via something like together AI to run the open weight models not more common? I've tried the open weight models and the premium models like Opus and Gemini Pro, and I find that the latter are a little better, but not nearly to the degree to justify the extreme price difference, since the differences largely don't matter for what I've tried them for, and I expect that many other users likely have similar use cases.
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  f311a
  How many more months do we need to wait, until big companies realize that flash models work just fine if you:1) Don't ask LLMs for big changes2) Review everything and point them in the right directionLarge models still suck at big changes, they produce questionable architecture and you still have to review the code, if your project is serious enough.The codebase quickly become a mess, if you don't pay enough attention. Does not matter which model.So why bother with big models, when flash models are 10x cheaper and much faster to iterate under guidance? Large models can be used for security and bug audits. Flash models work almost the same for changes under 300 LOC when you dictate how you want your code to look.
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  CharlieDigital
  $1500/mo is $18,000/seat/annum.Maybe Microsoft and Nvidia are on to something.128 GB machines that can run local LLMs are a bargain even if priced $5-8k. Yes, tok/s is not quite there, but that's probably OK since the bottleneck really isn't the code; it's WTF did Uber build with all of that spend? How did it meaningfully impact their revenue in a positive direction?
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  jkwang
  The $1500 number is less interesting than the fact that they hit a ceiling at all. Most engineering teams I've talked to have no idea what their AI spend is per developer because it's buried in a consolidated cloud bill. Having a hard cap forces two useful conversations: what workflows actually justify API calls vs local inference, and whether the output is being measured against any real productivity metric. Without that feedback loop it's just a race to see who can burn tokens fastest.
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  etothet
  In my experience, this is far below the cost the average dev will incur per month so this seems very reasonable to me. And, no doubt there are exceptions for heavy users so they can get some extra token usage when they need it.
• geodel
  > A $1,500 monthly limit per tool strikes me as a rational policy response to over-spending,...> 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.This whole article seems to me like Multi level marketing "businesses" where 'Diamonds' have made their money by promoting MLM in seminars and telling hopefuls at bottom that "Buying AI subscription now is their one shot to be a winner in life"Perhaps there is something to MLM vs LLM to create a FOMO effect.
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  newobj
  It's also a useful signal for AI value. Looks like it's a max value add of $18,000 per engineer per year.
• cmiles8
  And $1500 a month is on the very high end of where most companies will land. When you run the numbers there isn’t a realistic path that connects the dots between likely market size and the claimed valuation of the AI companies. The math simply does not add up.
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  galaxyLogic
  It's probabaly a good things that Uber-developers are now forced to do some coding on their own. Only use AI where it absolutely helps
• szatkus
  That's a lot. On my usual day I burn less than $1 on Opus. I could get beyond $10 only if I have a complex and well-defined problem, which is rare (the second part at least).
• 5701652400
  eventually tokens will cost price of energy. and china is miles ahead.china will be major token exporter soon. mark my words.
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  pmontra
  I wonder what they are doing with $1500 per month. I'm on Claude Pro $20 plan and I'm doing well. That's 3 days per week. On the other 2 days I'm using a customer's Claude Max, I don't know if it's the $100 or the $200 plan, but I'm sharing it with some of its other developers.
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  PessimalDecimal
  These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.
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  epsteingpt
  Uber engineers reported that loading their workspace and pulling recent commits exhausted that AI limit for Claude Code (4.8 x-high) immediately.
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  rasbmn
  Uber is in the business of experimenting with robotaxis and automated food delivery.They can't say that $0 per employee is the appropriate amount for AI spending. So they capped it, perhaps in order to "send a signal" that is eagerly picked up by the AI boosters.There is no signal. Uber does not work any better since AI. They still want to promote AI, so they chose the highest number that doesn't bankrupt them so the press and AI promoters pick it up as the new price anchor.Probably they'll quietly reduce the number more soon.
• hrpnk
  If budgeted at $1,500/month per user, power users still can get 5-10x of that allocation if the user pool is large enough.
• LurkandComment
  1) This happened because they fundementally misunderstand how to use AI and how AI is priced 2) Most organizations are throwing everything in for analyses and not limiting the answer they want. You need to be specific of about what you analyze and what answers you want 3) People undervalue prompting or templated responses. I will have written. validated and sanity checked a prompt several times and run it across several models before I say its ready for use. But when it is, I know what it will give me and that the scope of its research and answer is as close to what I want as it can be. As little excess as I can. This all saves tokens
• jwpapi
  If you estimate 10k salary per engineer that means the moment it’s cheaper for them to hire another engineer but that doesn’t mean it’s improving productivity 15% but if 15% is the moment it stopped being better than another human we can assume 7.5%?Probably even less because you would spend those 1500 extra per employee also if you just save 10% so 150 per employee that’s 1.5% on salary.This is imho one of the best ranges we can assume for now how much would that be on the whole swe market?
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  ilia-a
  Seems odd limit, especially since it highly dependant on Token provider used, with Opus this is not much and could easily be burnt in a week or less, but with something like deepseek the 1500 can literarily be an annual budget.That being said, I do have to wonder why someone as bug as say Uber, simply not rollout OSS model in the cloud for their team, I'd imagine that would be cheapest & most flexible option, while also keeping all the data shared with LLM private.
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxinghttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268871Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four monthshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrocketshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335388
• cyanydeez
  no....the fact that you could buy a reasonably prices MAC or AMD395+ thats AI tool pricing; it loads a big enough model and spits out tokens just fast enough that you can read what it's doing and comprehend it instead of magic.That's the most useful signal. Pre OpenAI mafia RAM pricing, that comes out to $250/month.
• cloudking
  They are also beholden to enterprise pricing and can't use the subsidized consumer max plans.
• sremani
  I have strong conviction that companies will now choose tech stack/programming languages based on 'tokenomics'. I am vibe coding using Clojure, a language I can read but cannot write and I never hit the usage limits even when using the latest model on Claude. I have similar experience with F#, which is a bit more verbose than clojure but absolutely beats every OOP language, Python, Typescript etc.The reason, I use F# & Clojure is they hit JVM and CLR, two popular enterprise stacks.In my not so humble opinion Lisp(Clojure) still remains the language of AI.
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  jedisct1
  A lot of things can be done with local models.
• dmaso191
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• throwaway613746
  [dead]
• Ozzie-D
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  ashahin
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