4 ms·

You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)

80 points by fi-le 7mo ago

iambateman 7mo ago
I 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.
- orthogonal_cube 7mo ago
  It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.
  - skybrian 7mo ago
    It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.) My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.
    - orthogonal_cube 7mo ago
      I agree that consumer goods normally get cheaper over time. Software that becomes commercialized, or sees a surge in enterprise demand, tends to go the other way. Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Slack for example.
- whynotmaybe 7mo ago
  Why do you expect the price to get closer? You can get a table from Ikea that costs a fraction of what an artisan makes. They're not the same final product but their functions is the same.
  - hahn-kev 7mo ago
    Either AI gets more expensive, or the 10k outsourcing gets cheaper.
aplomb1026 7mo ago
[flagged]
AstroBen 7mo ago
The 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.
- sharkjacobs 7mo ago
  There's this weird race where I have in my head some level of LLM performance which is "good enough" and the open models keep improving to that level, but by the time that they do my "good enough" has acclimatized to what I'm used to doing with the latest frontier models and what the open models are isn't good enough anymore. The "good enough" points so far have been - "as good as ChatGPT" - "as good as GPT4" - "as good as Sonnet 3.5" - "as good as Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2" Anyway, we'll see where the chinese models are in a year, and we'll see where my expectations are. Hopefully they overlap at some point.
- GeoAtreides 7mo ago
  >open models every time you see "open models" read: "binary blobs impossible to build locally temporarily not monetized"
Hansenq 7mo ago
If 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!
- jsheard 7mo ago
  > billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=desc https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.
  - A_D_E_P_T 7mo ago
    For me, it's London. > https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/london_id28720 https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/london...
    - phpnode 7mo ago
      Both of these are great, true expressions of a total void of taste
Simulacra 7mo ago
"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.
- pluc 7mo ago
  Or ad-supported LLMs where you can't guarantee the answer isn't sponsored.
  - Leynos 7mo ago
    Why doesn't the same caveat apply to a paid account? I mean, you have to declare when content is an advert, and if you are asserting that the owners of the chatbot are going to just ignore that requirement, won't they just do the same thing for paid accounts?
    - pluc 7mo ago
      I would assume they would until the profit of subscriptions surpasses the profit of anything else they can monetize. Why would they leave money on the table?
      - Leynos 7mo ago
        So "ad-supported" is redundant in your comment since you believe it applies to the paid accounts too?
827a 7mo ago
> 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.
- MattDaEskimo 7mo ago
  What's also wild is this being the first comment to mention it! Although there is an underlying truth: using LLMs for large-context tasks like coding is still extremely expensive.
- croes 7mo ago
  > The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course. Didn’t happen for me. On the Plus plan newer models reached the limit faster so less tasks where done until I had to wait 5 hours
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  I mean when it equated the $10 a month Copilot to Claude Max, I stopped taking the article seriously.
TIPSIO 7mo ago
An 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.
- eatsyourtacos 7mo ago
  Very true.. also I would say even what I get out of claude code is absolutely phenomenal right now.. but sometimes it does take minutes. I just had it take 15 minutes to do something. But what if you had access to the hardware to run it basically instantly? Just think how these big companies will use that kind of power for themselves to get even more extreme uses out of it.
deadbabe 7mo ago
It’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.
- allthetime 7mo ago
  Or, they have to hire people who still know what they're doing at a premium. Be those people.
mackeye 7mo ago
i 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.
Sevii 7mo ago
AI providers can only charge what the market can bear. AI isn't worth 20k/month for 'PHD' level work. But people are willing to pay for several $200/month subscriptions. But fundamentally AI compute is a commodity. GPUs are made in factories at scale. Assuming AI quality tapers off eventually supply will catch up to demand. Finally open weights models are good enough that the leading labs cannot charge high margins.
elashri 7mo ago
> OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors. At this price point, it will be cheaper to hire a bunch of actual PhDs. The vast majority who will not earn anything close to 250k per year in most of the world.
- ottah 7mo ago
  I also seriously question what even does PhD-level mean in the context of a model? Someone with a PhD has developed a very deep but narrow knowledge of a particular domain and has contributed to at least pushing out our sphere of knowledge a tiny bit in that pillar of competency. A model is a best a brittle, fractured and often inconsistent representation of written human knowledge and lacks most basic intuitive grounding in the world due to the lack of embodiment. In my experience, to safely get any value out of an LLM, you have to be more knowledgeable than the LLM on a topic. So in this case, you'd really need a PhD to use this tool, so at best its a $20k a month research aid, which honestly is far more expensive than a handful of grad students, and probably less effective.
- senordevnyc 7mo ago
  Yes, but I suspect part of the pitch is that the “PhD level models” will accomplish 50x as much in a year as the human PhD, because they’re faster AND they work 24/7. Whether they can deliver is another question, but I wouldn’t bet my career that they can’t.
skybrian 7mo ago
I've already switched to Sonnet 2.6 by default. It seems okay for the coding I do (working on a personal website) and it's 40% cheaper. Businesses will pay more since they can justify the cost. That seems fine?
armchairhacker 7mo ago
We’re already priced out of the best coding tools: human domain experts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234325) Unless you’re a top-tier domain expert. Then you’re safe until (if…) ASI.
pram 7mo ago
From my recent experience with Qwen 3.5 I am less concerned about this. It certainly will never be “the best” but I did some TS refactoring with Qwen + Opencode over the weekend and it was surprisingly good. I even asked Opus 4.6 to grade the commits and it usually gave it a B- haha.. Anyway, it might be worth it to invest in an LLM rig today if you’re paranoid.
- reenorap 7mo ago
  I used Qwen 3.5 for image descriptions and I was shocked at how great it was. Open Source models may be very useful now, one year ago they were really bad.
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  You can use hosted versions of Qwen or any other of the smaller models w/o having to invest in a LLM rig today... I plan to use the cheap hosted models until hardware advances enough to host locally in method that is more cost effective than the API costs. A couple of the hosting providers I'm looking at are https://synthetic.new https://synthetic.new and https://openrouter.ai https://openrouter.ai .. I'm sure there are tons more.
biddit 7mo ago
Strongly disagree with the thesis. Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.
- supern0va 7mo ago
  >Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Yes, but every high performing open weights model coming out of China has (supposedly) been caught distilling frontier models. It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions about the state of the open weights ecosystem based on information that may not be accurate. And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, we could see divergence between the two groups in terms of performance.
  - dragonwriter 7mo ago
    > And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, The big labs will not be able to reliably block distillation without further inhibiting general use of the models, which itself will help tip the balance away from commercial models.
    - reenorap 7mo ago
      No, you're wrong. It won't tip it away from commercial models. Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies. If they get rid of free usage people will simply pay for it.
      - dragonwriter 7mo ago
        > Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies. Just because a model is open doesn't mean that there aren't services that will run it for you (and which won't share any limits that the commercial model vendors impose to fight distillation because neither the host not the model creator cares if you are using the service to distill the model.) Many users of, particularly the larger, open models now are using such services, not running them using their own local or cloud compute.
madrox 7mo ago
I've been thinking about this as well, and I'm glad the author is talking about it. However, I don't think he took it far enough. It is correct to say there's near-infinite demand for AI, and supply is limited. It stands to reason that wealthier people will pay more, and therefore get more, out of AI. However, this has always been true, but historically instead of AI it's been workers. The economics of labor haven't changed. So it will, as always, be a game of how you deploy the workers you hire. Are you generating useless morning briefs or are you actually generating value for yourself and others with the AI you buy? If you generate more value that the tokens you burn, you'll get ahead. This will be true in academia as well, the area of interest to the author. He writes like, before AI, grad student level intelligence came for free. Ok, wait, sorry, bad example...
dimgl 7mo ago
The only way this happens is if models that are specifically made to do certain kinds of coding start to exist. Then this would start to become an issue, yes, until those models are distilled into smaller models.
raincole 7mo ago
> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially "Let's just make random shit up and expand it into a whole blog post." Seriously does anyone believe this premise? The Claude Max ($200/mo) is the same kind of product as Github Copilot ($10/mo) so the price 20x-ed?
- cactusplant7374 7mo ago
  OpenAI doubled Codex limits until April. If there is an issue with their platform they reset the limits early. This happened many times in December. They also added the 5.3 Spark model that has its own limit! The author doesn't even mention Codex even though it likely will out compete Claude Code.
9cb14c1ec0 7mo ago
I don't agree. There are a lot of inference performance improvements to make. I think the cost of inference continues to fall, and pretty much every application of AI becomes a commodity with brutal competition.
jatari 7mo ago
You get plenty from the $20 a month claude subscription. Just don't expect to leave it running on its own for hours a day.
yieldcrv 7mo ago
traders use bloomberg terminals at $30,000/yr they don't theoretically have to aside from that industry going that direction and the stickiness of communication through it, but it simplifies some of their job it didn't revolutionize trading or make it more democratized, despite simplifying some aspects of the industry the technology could have but it remains a specialized tool thats the way I see agentic coding tools and the trend is following it once the UX designers, PMs and ideas guys get bored of their newfound SaaS slop capabilities, it will be back to specialists doing this and nobody else
viblo 7mo ago
Regardless if the exponential trend the author writes about is correct or not, I do think the cost of AI is reversing the trend for coding. For quite some time the tools we used have become cheaper and cheaper and more avaliable than before. Nowadays compilers, IDEs and other tools are increasingly open source or at least free or very cheap. But with AI its no longer the case. I wrote more about this in a blog, at https://www.viblo.se/posts/ai-hobbycoding/ https://www.viblo.se/posts/ai-hobbycoding/
profstasiak 7mo ago
Idiots will Pay for AI to kill their skills
overgard 7mo ago
I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
- simianwords 7mo ago
  Same thing can be said about it a personal computer
- floatrock 7mo ago
  That just sounds like "controlling the means of production" with more clever wordplay.
  - overgard 7mo ago
    Not really. The "means of production" in software has basically been free (other than the cost of a computer) for like 20+ years.
    - ragall 7mo ago
      In software, the means of production are people, the developers. It's reproduction, not production that has become basically free.
- trcf23 7mo ago
  Yet most people seem to agree that AI favours skilled dev more than unskilled ones...
  - overgard 7mo ago
    Look at the marketing. It's focused on unskilled people.
- nh23423fefe 7mo ago
reenorap 7mo ago
I predicted months ago that $20/month isn't going to fly anymore. I think if it produces code, it will jump to $1000/month at least. The value of the LLM nowadays is much higher than $1000/month and I think we will see that happen in 2026, because these companies need to make money ASAP in order to get more funding for the next round of training.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  Demand (value created) isn't enough to make prices rise. You need supply to be constrained. If there was only one competent coding model, I'd be worried. But between competition and open weight models, we're not looking constrained on the supply side any time soon.
- stevenhuang 7mo ago
  It will never reach $1000/month for the simple fact you can run very capable open source models on your own hardware for next to nothing.
llm_nerd 7mo ago
I agree with the core assumption (to a point -- there is a point of diminishing return where pretty excellent tools are cheap), but this line is ridiculous- "the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo" Bullshit. I have the $20 plan and seldom hit the quota. I used to hit the distinct Opus quota, but now that isn't separate I just don't anymore. Even enabled the extra quota charging and have never paid a penny more. And to be clear, to most people I'm a pretty heavy user. Like, practically it has a heavy influence on my day to day work, and is an amazing contributor to my functions. The people who think only the $100+ tier is "usable" are often (albeit not always) usually the people doing the worthless, but "forward-thinking" nonsense, throwing millions of tokens aspirational. Like the OpenClaw nonsense is 99.99% worthless filler where people chased a productivity hack that in reality is just hobbyist silliness. It's token shredding for almost no value as people show that they're with it. People gloating about their swarms of agents doing effectively nothing are another "I need to max out everything" people. These are the ones who yield the result that AI has no benefit to productivity, as they overdo something to such ridiculous extremes. The same for the laughably poorly thought out MCP servers that flood a service with a quarter million tokens for negligible value. So much insanely poorly considered nonsense is in use, to the great glee of the AI companies. And, I mean, I guess I should thank these people for basically subsidizing it for the rest of us. The rest of us are surgically applying AI precisely, to incredible effect. The cheap plans are ridiculously valuable.
ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
None of this matters. Open weights will continue to be released. I don't need to have the absolute greatest LLM. I run Qwen3 locally and that's not even the best Qwen.
- relaxing 7mo ago
  How’s that going for you? Honestly, I’d like to read a review.
bambax 7mo ago
It's possible that prices will go up (although the cost of pure inference tends to go down; the question is more how to amortize the cost of training new models). But this is absurd: > the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo If you pay by the token instead of with a subscription, and don't send the entirety of your code base with each request, costs are ridiculously low. Like, $50 will last a minimum of 3 months of heavy use on openrouter. It's also far from certain everyone needs the latest version of the best "frontier model"; it very much depends on what you do.
- cactusplant7374 7mo ago
  I am imagining working for a company in the future where prompt reviews are required because the company is cheap.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  $50 will last you a good long time if you don't use many tokens, and you are judicious about which model you use, and don't need web search much. However, on a fixed price plan your behavior changes. It's a qualitative change in how you work, rather than quantitative. Ideation and product design and specification start becoming bottlenecks. I started out the API route. I started spending $100 a month once I was spending upawards of $10 in tokens a session.
EliRivers 7mo ago
"There was a time when everyone used Github Copilot." There was no such time. Even if everyone means "every software engineer" or any variation thereof, and we substitute any other such tool for GC.
firefoxd 7mo ago
I used to take Uber to work daily in 2016. It cost around 3 - 4 dollars per 5 miles ride. Now the same ride cost $24 [0]. There's no indication that AI coding tools won't follow the same path given they are funded by VC. But I think what matters is that the new generation of coders will adopt it as the norm. Gone are the days where you download a free text editor and just trial and error with the documentation one tab away. Every bootcamp is teaching react with clause and cursor. You have to pay to for a subscription to build your BMI calculator. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/paying-for-my-8-years-old-ride https://idiallo.com/blog/paying-for-my-8-years-old-ride
ottah 7mo ago
This chart is missing all of the non-us competition, which while not at the top, is always right behind the flagship models. These competitors also have much lower inference costs, due to the model architectures being built with a focus on efficiency. Silicon valley is building big block Chevys, while China is making Datsuns.
stephc_int13 7mo ago
This is very early. If there is an AI boom, what we're seeing is its infancy. Semi-autonomous coding is the first and most natural use case, thanks to vast amount of training material, opportunities for closed-loop RL with minimal human supervision and the eagerness of the community to try and embrace new tools. But it is still not much more than QoL improvement at this stage, and maybe some velocity gains for the most hardcore users willing to spend time and money to stay at the bleeding edge. But there is also a rather large appetite for local models, I am not sure the future of AI will be 100% cloud based.
sparkler123 7mo ago
I was continually hitting quota on the $20/mo Claude sub. I started doing the "pay for extra tokens" thing when I did hit it, but just upgrading proved to be far more cost effective. I upgraded to the $200/mo Max subscription and have been using almost exclusively Opus and barely get to 25% quota in any session (a couple times I got over 50% but I was having it go wild in concurrent sessions). I could probably downgrade to the $100/mo one and be fine, though. Sounds like a lot, but in the few weeks I've had it, I was able to complete two projects I had given up on due to not having time in the past. I re-jiggered some other monthly subscriptions so the net cost wasn't ultimately that much more than what I was paying previously. I also weighed it against buying something like a DGX Spark for local inference, but ultimately I don't want to mess with serving models (and the ones available just aren't as good, realistically), I just want a good one that works. I probably can't justify much more than $200/mo, but for what I get out of it, I'm happy to pay it. I've done more in the past few weeks on side projects than I had in a couple years.
samiv 7mo ago
I expect that in the "post scarcity" world where the capital class doesn't need majority of human labor for anything most people will be priced out of everything. Including the basic necessities. But sure, lets just keep automating ourselves out of jobs (and help other industries do it too) with no plan as to how to help all the displaced people.
Sarahcot 7mo ago
[dead]

80 points by fi-le 7mo ago

I 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.

orthogonal_cube 7mo ago
It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.
- skybrian 7mo ago
  It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.) My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.
  - orthogonal_cube 7mo ago
    I agree that consumer goods normally get cheaper over time. Software that becomes commercialized, or sees a surge in enterprise demand, tends to go the other way. Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Slack for example.
whynotmaybe 7mo ago
Why do you expect the price to get closer? You can get a table from Ikea that costs a fraction of what an artisan makes. They're not the same final product but their functions is the same.
- hahn-kev 7mo ago
  Either AI gets more expensive, or the 10k outsourcing gets cheaper.

aplomb1026 7mo ago

[flagged]

AstroBen 7mo ago

The 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.

sharkjacobs 7mo ago
There's this weird race where I have in my head some level of LLM performance which is "good enough" and the open models keep improving to that level, but by the time that they do my "good enough" has acclimatized to what I'm used to doing with the latest frontier models and what the open models are isn't good enough anymore. The "good enough" points so far have been - "as good as ChatGPT" - "as good as GPT4" - "as good as Sonnet 3.5" - "as good as Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2" Anyway, we'll see where the chinese models are in a year, and we'll see where my expectations are. Hopefully they overlap at some point.
GeoAtreides 7mo ago
>open models every time you see "open models" read: "binary blobs impossible to build locally temporarily not monetized"

Hansenq 7mo ago

If 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!

jsheard 7mo ago
> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=desc https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.
- A_D_E_P_T 7mo ago
  For me, it's London. > https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/london_id28720 https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/london...
  - phpnode 7mo ago
    Both of these are great, true expressions of a total void of taste

Simulacra 7mo ago

"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.

pluc 7mo ago
Or ad-supported LLMs where you can't guarantee the answer isn't sponsored.
- Leynos 7mo ago
  Why doesn't the same caveat apply to a paid account? I mean, you have to declare when content is an advert, and if you are asserting that the owners of the chatbot are going to just ignore that requirement, won't they just do the same thing for paid accounts?
  - pluc 7mo ago
    I would assume they would until the profit of subscriptions surpasses the profit of anything else they can monetize. Why would they leave money on the table?
    - Leynos 7mo ago
      So "ad-supported" is redundant in your comment since you believe it applies to the paid accounts too?

827a 7mo ago

> 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.

MattDaEskimo 7mo ago
What's also wild is this being the first comment to mention it! Although there is an underlying truth: using LLMs for large-context tasks like coding is still extremely expensive.
croes 7mo ago
> The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course. Didn’t happen for me. On the Plus plan newer models reached the limit faster so less tasks where done until I had to wait 5 hours
NewsaHackO 7mo ago
I mean when it equated the $10 a month Copilot to Claude Max, I stopped taking the article seriously.

TIPSIO 7mo ago

An 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.

eatsyourtacos 7mo ago
Very true.. also I would say even what I get out of claude code is absolutely phenomenal right now.. but sometimes it does take minutes. I just had it take 15 minutes to do something. But what if you had access to the hardware to run it basically instantly? Just think how these big companies will use that kind of power for themselves to get even more extreme uses out of it.

deadbabe 7mo ago

It’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.

allthetime 7mo ago
Or, they have to hire people who still know what they're doing at a premium. Be those people.

mackeye 7mo ago

i 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.

Sevii 7mo ago

AI providers can only charge what the market can bear. AI isn't worth 20k/month for 'PHD' level work. But people are willing to pay for several $200/month subscriptions. But fundamentally AI compute is a commodity. GPUs are made in factories at scale. Assuming AI quality tapers off eventually supply will catch up to demand. Finally open weights models are good enough that the leading labs cannot charge high margins.

elashri 7mo ago

> OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors. At this price point, it will be cheaper to hire a bunch of actual PhDs. The vast majority who will not earn anything close to 250k per year in most of the world.

ottah 7mo ago
I also seriously question what even does PhD-level mean in the context of a model? Someone with a PhD has developed a very deep but narrow knowledge of a particular domain and has contributed to at least pushing out our sphere of knowledge a tiny bit in that pillar of competency. A model is a best a brittle, fractured and often inconsistent representation of written human knowledge and lacks most basic intuitive grounding in the world due to the lack of embodiment. In my experience, to safely get any value out of an LLM, you have to be more knowledgeable than the LLM on a topic. So in this case, you'd really need a PhD to use this tool, so at best its a $20k a month research aid, which honestly is far more expensive than a handful of grad students, and probably less effective.
senordevnyc 7mo ago
Yes, but I suspect part of the pitch is that the “PhD level models” will accomplish 50x as much in a year as the human PhD, because they’re faster AND they work 24/7. Whether they can deliver is another question, but I wouldn’t bet my career that they can’t.

skybrian 7mo ago

I've already switched to Sonnet 2.6 by default. It seems okay for the coding I do (working on a personal website) and it's 40% cheaper. Businesses will pay more since they can justify the cost. That seems fine?

armchairhacker 7mo ago

We’re already priced out of the best coding tools: human domain experts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234325) Unless you’re a top-tier domain expert. Then you’re safe until (if…) ASI.

pram 7mo ago

From my recent experience with Qwen 3.5 I am less concerned about this. It certainly will never be “the best” but I did some TS refactoring with Qwen + Opencode over the weekend and it was surprisingly good. I even asked Opus 4.6 to grade the commits and it usually gave it a B- haha.. Anyway, it might be worth it to invest in an LLM rig today if you’re paranoid.

reenorap 7mo ago
I used Qwen 3.5 for image descriptions and I was shocked at how great it was. Open Source models may be very useful now, one year ago they were really bad.
eikenberry 7mo ago
You can use hosted versions of Qwen or any other of the smaller models w/o having to invest in a LLM rig today... I plan to use the cheap hosted models until hardware advances enough to host locally in method that is more cost effective than the API costs. A couple of the hosting providers I'm looking at are https://synthetic.new https://synthetic.new and https://openrouter.ai https://openrouter.ai .. I'm sure there are tons more.

biddit 7mo ago

Strongly disagree with the thesis. Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.

supern0va 7mo ago
>Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Yes, but every high performing open weights model coming out of China has (supposedly) been caught distilling frontier models. It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions about the state of the open weights ecosystem based on information that may not be accurate. And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, we could see divergence between the two groups in terms of performance.
- dragonwriter 7mo ago
  > And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, The big labs will not be able to reliably block distillation without further inhibiting general use of the models, which itself will help tip the balance away from commercial models.
  - reenorap 7mo ago
    No, you're wrong. It won't tip it away from commercial models. Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies. If they get rid of free usage people will simply pay for it.
    - dragonwriter 7mo ago
      > Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies. Just because a model is open doesn't mean that there aren't services that will run it for you (and which won't share any limits that the commercial model vendors impose to fight distillation because neither the host not the model creator cares if you are using the service to distill the model.) Many users of, particularly the larger, open models now are using such services, not running them using their own local or cloud compute.

madrox 7mo ago

I've been thinking about this as well, and I'm glad the author is talking about it. However, I don't think he took it far enough. It is correct to say there's near-infinite demand for AI, and supply is limited. It stands to reason that wealthier people will pay more, and therefore get more, out of AI. However, this has always been true, but historically instead of AI it's been workers. The economics of labor haven't changed. So it will, as always, be a game of how you deploy the workers you hire. Are you generating useless morning briefs or are you actually generating value for yourself and others with the AI you buy? If you generate more value that the tokens you burn, you'll get ahead. This will be true in academia as well, the area of interest to the author. He writes like, before AI, grad student level intelligence came for free. Ok, wait, sorry, bad example...

dimgl 7mo ago

The only way this happens is if models that are specifically made to do certain kinds of coding start to exist. Then this would start to become an issue, yes, until those models are distilled into smaller models.

raincole 7mo ago

> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially "Let's just make random shit up and expand it into a whole blog post." Seriously does anyone believe this premise? The Claude Max ($200/mo) is the same kind of product as Github Copilot ($10/mo) so the price 20x-ed?

cactusplant7374 7mo ago
OpenAI doubled Codex limits until April. If there is an issue with their platform they reset the limits early. This happened many times in December. They also added the 5.3 Spark model that has its own limit! The author doesn't even mention Codex even though it likely will out compete Claude Code.

9cb14c1ec0 7mo ago

I don't agree. There are a lot of inference performance improvements to make. I think the cost of inference continues to fall, and pretty much every application of AI becomes a commodity with brutal competition.

jatari 7mo ago

You get plenty from the $20 a month claude subscription. Just don't expect to leave it running on its own for hours a day.

yieldcrv 7mo ago

traders use bloomberg terminals at $30,000/yr they don't theoretically have to aside from that industry going that direction and the stickiness of communication through it, but it simplifies some of their job it didn't revolutionize trading or make it more democratized, despite simplifying some aspects of the industry the technology could have but it remains a specialized tool thats the way I see agentic coding tools and the trend is following it once the UX designers, PMs and ideas guys get bored of their newfound SaaS slop capabilities, it will be back to specialists doing this and nobody else

viblo 7mo ago

Regardless if the exponential trend the author writes about is correct or not, I do think the cost of AI is reversing the trend for coding. For quite some time the tools we used have become cheaper and cheaper and more avaliable than before. Nowadays compilers, IDEs and other tools are increasingly open source or at least free or very cheap. But with AI its no longer the case. I wrote more about this in a blog, at https://www.viblo.se/posts/ai-hobbycoding/ https://www.viblo.se/posts/ai-hobbycoding/

profstasiak 7mo ago

Idiots will Pay for AI to kill their skills

overgard 7mo ago

I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!

simianwords 7mo ago
Same thing can be said about it a personal computer
floatrock 7mo ago
That just sounds like "controlling the means of production" with more clever wordplay.
- overgard 7mo ago
  Not really. The "means of production" in software has basically been free (other than the cost of a computer) for like 20+ years.
  - ragall 7mo ago
    In software, the means of production are people, the developers. It's reproduction, not production that has become basically free.
trcf23 7mo ago
Yet most people seem to agree that AI favours skilled dev more than unskilled ones...
- overgard 7mo ago
  Look at the marketing. It's focused on unskilled people.
nh23423fefe 7mo ago

reenorap 7mo ago

I predicted months ago that $20/month isn't going to fly anymore. I think if it produces code, it will jump to $1000/month at least. The value of the LLM nowadays is much higher than $1000/month and I think we will see that happen in 2026, because these companies need to make money ASAP in order to get more funding for the next round of training.

barrkel 7mo ago
Demand (value created) isn't enough to make prices rise. You need supply to be constrained. If there was only one competent coding model, I'd be worried. But between competition and open weight models, we're not looking constrained on the supply side any time soon.
stevenhuang 7mo ago
It will never reach $1000/month for the simple fact you can run very capable open source models on your own hardware for next to nothing.

llm_nerd 7mo ago

I agree with the core assumption (to a point -- there is a point of diminishing return where pretty excellent tools are cheap), but this line is ridiculous- "the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo" Bullshit. I have the $20 plan and seldom hit the quota. I used to hit the distinct Opus quota, but now that isn't separate I just don't anymore. Even enabled the extra quota charging and have never paid a penny more. And to be clear, to most people I'm a pretty heavy user. Like, practically it has a heavy influence on my day to day work, and is an amazing contributor to my functions. The people who think only the $100+ tier is "usable" are often (albeit not always) usually the people doing the worthless, but "forward-thinking" nonsense, throwing millions of tokens aspirational. Like the OpenClaw nonsense is 99.99% worthless filler where people chased a productivity hack that in reality is just hobbyist silliness. It's token shredding for almost no value as people show that they're with it. People gloating about their swarms of agents doing effectively nothing are another "I need to max out everything" people. These are the ones who yield the result that AI has no benefit to productivity, as they overdo something to such ridiculous extremes. The same for the laughably poorly thought out MCP servers that flood a service with a quarter million tokens for negligible value. So much insanely poorly considered nonsense is in use, to the great glee of the AI companies. And, I mean, I guess I should thank these people for basically subsidizing it for the rest of us. The rest of us are surgically applying AI precisely, to incredible effect. The cheap plans are ridiculously valuable.

ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago

None of this matters. Open weights will continue to be released. I don't need to have the absolute greatest LLM. I run Qwen3 locally and that's not even the best Qwen.

relaxing 7mo ago
How’s that going for you? Honestly, I’d like to read a review.

bambax 7mo ago

It's possible that prices will go up (although the cost of pure inference tends to go down; the question is more how to amortize the cost of training new models). But this is absurd: > the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo If you pay by the token instead of with a subscription, and don't send the entirety of your code base with each request, costs are ridiculously low. Like, $50 will last a minimum of 3 months of heavy use on openrouter. It's also far from certain everyone needs the latest version of the best "frontier model"; it very much depends on what you do.

cactusplant7374 7mo ago
I am imagining working for a company in the future where prompt reviews are required because the company is cheap.
barrkel 7mo ago
$50 will last you a good long time if you don't use many tokens, and you are judicious about which model you use, and don't need web search much. However, on a fixed price plan your behavior changes. It's a qualitative change in how you work, rather than quantitative. Ideation and product design and specification start becoming bottlenecks. I started out the API route. I started spending $100 a month once I was spending upawards of $10 in tokens a session.

EliRivers 7mo ago

"There was a time when everyone used Github Copilot." There was no such time. Even if everyone means "every software engineer" or any variation thereof, and we substitute any other such tool for GC.

firefoxd 7mo ago

I used to take Uber to work daily in 2016. It cost around 3 - 4 dollars per 5 miles ride. Now the same ride cost $24 [0]. There's no indication that AI coding tools won't follow the same path given they are funded by VC. But I think what matters is that the new generation of coders will adopt it as the norm. Gone are the days where you download a free text editor and just trial and error with the documentation one tab away. Every bootcamp is teaching react with clause and cursor. You have to pay to for a subscription to build your BMI calculator. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/paying-for-my-8-years-old-ride https://idiallo.com/blog/paying-for-my-8-years-old-ride

ottah 7mo ago

This chart is missing all of the non-us competition, which while not at the top, is always right behind the flagship models. These competitors also have much lower inference costs, due to the model architectures being built with a focus on efficiency. Silicon valley is building big block Chevys, while China is making Datsuns.

stephc_int13 7mo ago

This is very early. If there is an AI boom, what we're seeing is its infancy. Semi-autonomous coding is the first and most natural use case, thanks to vast amount of training material, opportunities for closed-loop RL with minimal human supervision and the eagerness of the community to try and embrace new tools. But it is still not much more than QoL improvement at this stage, and maybe some velocity gains for the most hardcore users willing to spend time and money to stay at the bleeding edge. But there is also a rather large appetite for local models, I am not sure the future of AI will be 100% cloud based.

sparkler123 7mo ago

I was continually hitting quota on the $20/mo Claude sub. I started doing the "pay for extra tokens" thing when I did hit it, but just upgrading proved to be far more cost effective. I upgraded to the $200/mo Max subscription and have been using almost exclusively Opus and barely get to 25% quota in any session (a couple times I got over 50% but I was having it go wild in concurrent sessions). I could probably downgrade to the $100/mo one and be fine, though. Sounds like a lot, but in the few weeks I've had it, I was able to complete two projects I had given up on due to not having time in the past. I re-jiggered some other monthly subscriptions so the net cost wasn't ultimately that much more than what I was paying previously. I also weighed it against buying something like a DGX Spark for local inference, but ultimately I don't want to mess with serving models (and the ones available just aren't as good, realistically), I just want a good one that works. I probably can't justify much more than $200/mo, but for what I get out of it, I'm happy to pay it. I've done more in the past few weeks on side projects than I had in a couple years.

samiv 7mo ago

I expect that in the "post scarcity" world where the capital class doesn't need majority of human labor for anything most people will be priced out of everything. Including the basic necessities. But sure, lets just keep automating ourselves out of jobs (and help other industries do it too) with no plan as to how to help all the displaced people.

Sarahcot 7mo ago

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