Please do.
Use it all.
Bankrupt these shit companies and help burst the bubble
This is their strategy, they want people to use it, get hooked, replace parts of their day-to-day life with it, make it to difficult to “just go back”, then hit them with the actual bill.
They won’t go bankrupt unless their backers walk, and their backers are still quite confident in this strategy… because it’s working.
I wonder what companies that have integrated AI into all their workflows and processes are planning to do when the times comes to pay real price for the tokens.
spoiler
Nothing. They aren’t thinking ahead.
All the investors know it’s a massive money sink right now. The goal isn’t for “everyone” to get to use AI.
It’s to get so many people used to using AI that businesses like law offices and hospitals and ither corporations so ingrained and built around having AI l, while leaving so many graduating college students useless without AI that businesses will be reliant upon it, no matter what costs of it they will have to absorb.
In five years there won’t be a $200 plan. There will be a $15,000 plan per person and businesses will pay it because they won’t be able to do well without it.
I think there may also a horizontal scheme as monopolies take on a global scale. Those businesses that sell in bankruptcy due to high tech costs could be gobbled up by the biggest AI-native competition. It’s a leap but maybe in a decade your optometrist is replaced by an ai kiosk with a remote technician?
The last calculation I got (from an AI) is that 1M USD performance today, in hardware, is 100k USD in a year. Make it it what you want. But this is what companies are gambling on. Users now is profit later.
See gym and carwash memberships
The total I spent on AI is $0. How much AI can I get for that?
Quite a bit if you actually wanted to use it. Opencode offers enough usage for free that you could create full apps from it lol, caveat being that their free plan usage is being used to train the models you use. But then everyone is probably doing it on their paid plans as well.
I would prefer none, but there’s AI being forced on us everywhere these days.
If you keep opening a new private tab and starting new conversations with chatgpt, your usage including uploads is free!
a little bit per maybe
This is just Gym Economics though, right? They work on the assumption that only a small number of their member will actually use the service heavily, but the overwhelming majority will turn up to use the treadmill a few times then never visit again.
Ok but it would take 70 users paying $200 to cover the cost of $14,000. So if one person maxes out their usage, there needs to be 69 users who do not use their account at all but are still paying. And that’s just the break even point, still no profit for the AI company.
I’m struggling to believe that many people would pay that much and then underuse the subscription. It seems far more likely to me that this pricing model isn’t sustainable.
Even worse, that calculation is based on that their API pricing is currently providing a positive margin. From what I have seen and heard at this point, API pricing is at best breaking even.
Nice try, I still ain’t gonna pay. OpenAI can go bankrupt without burning my money
If you’ve got a toy project that you want “AI” to give you a hand with, do it now.
Pretty soon all these companies are going to have to pay for all that investment in compute resources they’ve been busily soaking up over the last few years, and then they’re going to have to pay back their investors, and then they’re going to have to try and make a profit
This is the golden time for cheap commercial AI. Already the noose is starting to tighten, and it will never again be as cheap as it is now.
This is the golden time for cheap commercial AI.
I suppose, but small open weight models with more advanced coding frameworks optimized for them are catching up fast and you can do it privately at home on a mostly affordable consumer graphics card.
If you have solar it’s basically free, minus the graphics card CapEx you may want for gaming anyway, as well as some setup time and a bit of patience.
What’s your setup, if I may ask? I’m using llama.cpp router with vscode kilo.ai and qwen3.6-35B-MoE-MTP as a model mostly. It’s surprisingly good as a coding assistant, but I think you have to know what you are doing and know your stuff(aka be an experienced developer) to make it useful. just letting it vibe leads to crap code
just letting it vibe leads to crap code
Yup, vibe is occasionally useful for proof of concept stuff, but disastrous for maintainability, security, readability, or large codebases. Without experience it’s still a foot gun for anything even slightly serious.
Best approaches for a learner are to consider it autocomplete that needs research. Look up what it’s suggesting, see if it’s hallucinating, with luck it’ll point you in a useful direction where you can learn a good solution, as it has no idea what that is. Also makes a pretty good rubber duck for hashing out architectural decisions, finding alternative approaches etc, though you’ll have to point it at a web search for that. Spin up an e.g. vane instance for this, as small models don’t have enough world knowledge. Use it to write (or preferably copy from its system prompt examples) boilerplate and unit tests, perhaps descriptive comments (doublecheck).
One thing to do is put everything you learn about coding style into your system prompt as they’re dogshit at consistent style without significant beatings around the head. Finding your own comfortable, consistent style is super useful for future readability. The joke about when I wrote this only God and I understood it, now only God does, will come clear in a month or two. Learn to work around it. Simple beats fancy unless you truly need the speed.
While I do use agent iterative approaches, probably best to approach that organically as you grow, monsters lurk there. If you must, containerize / vm / isolate the hell out of something like opencode to muck around with.
FWIW I still write most of my code by hand, it’s simpler and more consistent, but I’m keeping an eye on the development of LLMs, and I will let it write scut code (that I edit later). Code and Mathematics are super structured languages, pretty much ideal for large language models, so I can see them maybe, eventually getting good. More general thought, not so much without significant architectural upgrades.
Sounds like it’ll never be worth it.
In five years once this RAM nonsense is over you’ll be able to run a comparatively high quality local LLM for very little money. I can’t see how these companies will ever make their money back.
If manufacturers are willing to sell components to us in five years that is.
Of course if the colllapse happens before then the story might be different…
I’m slightly optimistic that manufacturers will return to the retail market eventually. Every AI company is racing to hyperscale right now but there will be a point where the infrastructure is built and at that point the growth will slow down quite a bit. In that scenario there will be ongoing demand for components to be replaced as they become obsolete but I can’t imagine the demand will be the same level it is right now as everyone rushes to build.
That’s assuming this all works the way they want it to. If the economics aren’t viable and the bubble bursts…
Their Datacenter buildout doesn’t work they want to. Most projects are very much delayed, and those that even started getting built are over budget. OpenAI and Anthropic will collapse in the next years, and this is coming from someone who absolutely sees the good things about the technology itself.
OpenAI and Anthropic will collapse in the next years
Stop, I can only handle so much good news!
There is no way, absolutely NO WAY to recuperate the amount of cash burnt on those two companies, and that is not even counting the amount of AI Startup whose cash is currently flowing towards to those two.
🤞
Sounds like price hikes to communicate costs are coming and resources are going to be redistributed to productive uses.
deleted by creator
The actual cost to OpenAI is likely much less. The number in the article is calculating the API cost that a fully maxed out subscription would incur theoretically. The API token cost, however, is far above the actual computational cost.
The actual price is hard to really know, but I think training should also factor in. The hype of LLMs is based on the fantastical idea of continunous improvement forever, so you need to keep training. Even ignoring the hype part, you still need to retrain simply to update the data inside the LLM.
I guess we’ll only know for sure after the crash/readjustment.
I disagree - the analysis takes as a basis a very, very generous margin of 75% on API prices. There is no way they have that much of a margin, this is wishful thinking.
And every single user who maxes out their 200$-subscription burns more cash than they take in from 70 subscriptions that lie dormant.
I was talking to one of our cloud architects at work yesterday. They did a test and just ran in “asdf” to a chat prompt, and were able to trace the costs. It was 12 cents.
I could totally see AI costs getting out of control very quickly. Doing something like a Copilot formula in an Excel spreadsheet is easily going to run up hundreds of dollars of costs eventually.
It’s a 200 dollar subscribtion. Are any actual users around that can provide info on how actively they are using it? I would feel that at 200 dollars they give you loads of headroom.
For Anthropic at least, your usage is broken up into five hour windows. During peak periods the usage is burnt in like 1/3 of the time compared to off-peak. You can do heaps, like build large sophisticated applications with 100% agentic workflows, if you spread your usage out over your five hour windows and especially if you use it mostly in the off peak.
On pro, your five hour usage is basically one solid feature developed or one big refactor/cleanup with opus 4.8 with some room left over for reviews, planning and a little mistake. 5x and 10x plans are more in the price range you mention, so multiply that as such. Or you’d get a combination of general purpose daily usage, and development usage.
There’s also a weekly cap but I haven’t hit it.
Fable, aka locked down mythos, when it was available on pro could complete my entire todo list for the day in half an hour at astounding quality while simplifying everything it touches, finding and fixing preexisting vulnerabilities in code review and finishing with 98% of the five hour quota used off-peak
I don’t think most hobbyists would use more than a quarter of a pro plan due to the five hour lockout mechanism
Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although — in certain cases — the caps can be exceeded with permission, the company says.
The news is perhaps not too surprising, since, in April, the company’s CTO revealed that the ridesharing giant had blown through its entire annual AI budget in a matter of four months. That appears to have occurred after Uber encouraged staff to use AI “as much as possible” and even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards, The Information previously reported.
This isn’t that relevant to my question.
So far i pay 10 bucks for opencode
And i think thats about the highest i will pay
Preferably less
Opencode Go is a pretty good value for the amount of credits you get and the TUI and web/desktop client is pretty good.
I’m really happy switching to opencode after copilot got ridiculous with their pricing bullshit this month
Yeah it’s a steal right now. They lose around 50$ in raw token cost if you max out the use.
Very much not sustainable business model either just like copilot wasn’t.
Here is the second part of the table btw, with an illusory 75% margin on API pricing:
This will never be profitable if not specialized into very specific areas with very large payoffs. Even coding isn’t paying off enough.
those who subscribed should set up bots to use that full potential
let AI write that bot
Do you want a Butlerian Jihad? Because that’s how you get a Butlerian Jihad
Hopefully it doesn’t crash when the usage goes up a bit.
Who cares? Only morons use it.
