5 ms·
You cannot afford the SOTA.
by rf15 7mo ago
You cannot afford the SOTA.
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoWhy is that? The $200 per month subscription comes with a ton of usage. Opus 4.6 is available on the $20 plan too
- komali2 7mo agoI'm starting to think in these conversations we're all often talking about two different things. You're talking about running an LLM service through its provided tooling (codex, Claude, cursor), others seem to be talking token costs because they're integrating LLMs into software or are using harness systems like opencode, pi, or openclaw and balancing tasks across models.
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoFair enough, I read it quickly and assumed the person they replied to was talking about Claude Code But I run a AI SaaS and we do offer Opus 4.6, too. Our use case is not nearly as token intensive as something like coding so we are still able to offer it with a good profit margin. Also you can run OpenClaw with your CC subscription. It's what I do.
- BoorishBears 7mo agoI wrap Opus 4.5 in a consumer product with 0 economic utility and people pay for it, I'm sure plenty of end users are willing to pay for it in their software. Edit: I'm not using the term of art, I mean it literally cannot make them money.
- eru 7mo ago> [...] in a consumer product with 0 economic utility and people pay for it, [...] Sorry, how do these two things go together? If people pay for it, it has economic utility, doesn't it? I mean, people pay to watch movies or play video games, too.
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago> The $200 per month subscription comes with a ton of usage. 200 USD/month is a number only really affluent programmers (e.g. in the Silicon Valley) can perhaps pay easily.
- weird-eye-issue 7mo ago"Opus 4.6 is available on the $20 plan too"
- revolvingthrow 7mo agoAnthropic’s $20 plan gives you such a pittance of tokens that it’s borderline unusable for anything more than a few scripts or a toy app. If $20 is all you have you’d do _much_ better going with chatgpt
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoThat's simply not true at all.
- Weryj 7mo agoMy usage is in the $60 tier, but that doesn't exist so I have to cough up $100. And then get all shaky if I don't use up my weekly quota.
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoDo you mostly just hit the session limits? If so I know it's not ideal but you could wait an hour or two for that to reset. Not sure if that would work for you but just a suggestion
- Weryj 7mo agoI get to 80% when on a single session and cap out a hour off the rest if I’m working on two. But I like to have that forced hour to stop, it’s moment to take a breath. It depends on the kind of work though, some things are more token intensive.
- Epholys 7mo ago> The $200 per month subscription comes with a ton of usage. $200 dollars + VAT is half of my rent. I know HN is not a good place to rant on this subject, but I'm often flabbergasted about the number of people here that lives in a bubble with regard to the price of tech. Or just prices in general. I remember someone who said a few years ago (I'm paraphrasing): "You could just use one of the empty room in your house!". It was so outlandish I believed it was a joke at first. EDIT: "not", minor grammar
- Bombthecat 7mo agoThat's why ai is for the "rich". Poor people or later on middle class will be left behind....
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoNah, that's why you cannot not afford the subscriptions these days. Whatever your needs, ever since Claude Code became a thing, subscription costs come out massively cheaper than pay-as-you-go per-token API pricing. Also SOTA models are so much better than anything else, that using older or open models will just cost you more in tokens/electricity than going for SOTA subscription. Subscriptions are definitely middle-class targeted. $20/month is not much for the value provided, at least not in the western world. But if by "rich" you just mean "westerners", then in this sense, the same is and has always been true for computing in general.
- sroussey 7mo agoThe subscriptions are purposely sold for less than cost. The subsidy will end some day.
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoWe'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Especially in context of discussing living at different economic strata, customers are neither expected nor supposed to voluntarily overpay out of a belief this will make an industry not try to rugpull everyone at some point.
- m4rtink 7mo agoA subscription for coding - no thanks.
- weird-eye-issue 7mo agoIf you think it's only for coding you don't have much of an imagination :)
- RetroSteve0 7mo agoThese are the types of individuals that become so left in the dust that they don't realize what's going on anymore, and it's obvious this person is already there. Claude hasn't been a "subscription for coding" product for quite some time now. That's how it started out and while that's certainly what Claude is known for, Anthropic has been pushing for Claude to also be a general productivity tool -- Claude Code, then Claude Desktop, Claude Work, and now Claude Desktop has Chat, Work, and Code essentially built into a single desktop app that just works wonders for those who are looking for a general productivity tool. I'd not use it over pure Claude Code because I am at heart a coder and I want the raw terminal experience and there's some features missing from the "Code" tab in Claude Desktop, but just saying "a subscription to code", just goes to show how out of touch that person already is, and that's what resistance does to you when you try to resist making use of any kind of modern tooling or technology.
- m4rtink 7mo agoI should have been more precise - I don't want to depend on paying to a third party to be able to do meaningful coding. They cane take that away from you at any time for any reason, make it too expensive, etc. A working PC with a Linux distro has been enough and should be enough. Everything else is a time bomb.
- andoando 7mo agoI dunno how you guys even go throuh the $200 subscription. I use it every day for work and side projects doing tasks in parallel and Im no where newr the limit on $100.