4 ms·

Get them addicted then cut them off. Oldest trick in the book.

toomuchtodo 4mo ago
More of a free trial to those authenticated and qualified with existing payment. Subscription billing is going away for sure though eventually based on the economics. Token “all you can eat” is a capital furnace otherwise. (I’m highly confident open models will eventually achieve a similar performance benchmark with distillation over time)
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  Subs lose money on individuals to get those individuals to force their companies to pay for the corporate plan. The economics are bad, but so are the economics of grocery stores selling Milk and Bananas at a loss to drive traffic, which they basically ALL do.
  - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
    Companies don’t want to pay when the value realized does not exceed the cost. AI Savings Misses 'Should Be Making Executives Uncomfortable,' Bain Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359010 - June 2026 (0 comments) AI sticker shock hits corporate America- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307098 - May 2026 (146 comments)
    - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
      What's the realized value of not losing your engineers because you're letting them use their preferred tools?
      - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
        Retain and hire the engineers who don’t require heavy use of AI to deliver value? The current SWE job market speaks for itself. Where will you go where they will let you burn up tokens in a high cost of capital macro? ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) is over, software engineers no longer call the shots now that there isn’t vast amounts of capital chasing yield, and that capital bidding up salaries and keeping the labor market for engineers tight. If you are x more productive with generative AI, very shortly you are going to have to prove it with a token budget (or, if you’re lucky, an org willing to spend for on prem hardware for capped token cost, fixed capex vs uncapped opex). The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it.
        toomuchtodo 4mo ago
        > The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it. https://abhishek-shankar.com/posts/ai-coding-bill-headcount-problem https://abhishek-shankar.com/posts/ai-coding-bill-headcount-... > That is the real content of the Uber story, and it is why filing it under "budgeting discipline" misses what is actually unfolding across half the engineering organizations in the country right now. They ran the same experiment Uber ran, most of them without Uber's $3.4 billion R&D cushion to absorb the surprise, and almost none of them having modeled the heavy-user tail or instrumented the gap between tokens consumed and value shipped. The reckoning will arrive for each of them on their own fiscal calendar, and the first instinct will be the wrong one. The tool is too good to abandon, the bill is too large to absorb, and the only durable resolution runs through a question the entire rollout was designed to defer. > You cannot get labor-replacement economics out of a tool you deployed as a labor supplement, and the bill comes due before anyone is willing to admit which one they actually bought.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    I havent seen any evidence showing that subscriptions cost the labs money.
  - eptcyka 4mo ago
    I pay a lot but barely use it except for some intense days, where the lower plans would have throttled me in like 30 minutes. API billing is still more expensive. If you want to not pay much, go to openrouter and use chinese models. They are cost efficient.
- chinathrow 4mo ago
  Yeah that payment scheme sounds like they gear up to shift everyone into API token prices, eventually. Time to convert the existing tokens into software, until then.
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  Mythos-class models will diffuse throughout the world by 2029 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498512 - June 2026

More of a free trial to those authenticated and qualified with existing payment. Subscription billing is going away for sure though eventually based on the economics. Token “all you can eat” is a capital furnace otherwise. (I’m highly confident open models will eventually achieve a similar performance benchmark with distillation over time)

CuriouslyC 4mo ago
Subs lose money on individuals to get those individuals to force their companies to pay for the corporate plan. The economics are bad, but so are the economics of grocery stores selling Milk and Bananas at a loss to drive traffic, which they basically ALL do.
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  Companies don’t want to pay when the value realized does not exceed the cost. AI Savings Misses 'Should Be Making Executives Uncomfortable,' Bain Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359010 - June 2026 (0 comments) AI sticker shock hits corporate America- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307098 - May 2026 (146 comments)
  - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
    What's the realized value of not losing your engineers because you're letting them use their preferred tools?
    - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
      Retain and hire the engineers who don’t require heavy use of AI to deliver value? The current SWE job market speaks for itself. Where will you go where they will let you burn up tokens in a high cost of capital macro? ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) is over, software engineers no longer call the shots now that there isn’t vast amounts of capital chasing yield, and that capital bidding up salaries and keeping the labor market for engineers tight. If you are x more productive with generative AI, very shortly you are going to have to prove it with a token budget (or, if you’re lucky, an org willing to spend for on prem hardware for capped token cost, fixed capex vs uncapped opex). The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it.
      - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
        > The comparison is not SWE vs SWE with AI. It is SWE vs SWE with AI with a constrained token budget ($x/month) delivering the same value at the same or lower cost. If you cannot prove that you are wildly (vs marginally) more productive with the AI, why would they pay for it? Prove it. https://abhishek-shankar.com/posts/ai-coding-bill-headcount-problem https://abhishek-shankar.com/posts/ai-coding-bill-headcount-... > That is the real content of the Uber story, and it is why filing it under "budgeting discipline" misses what is actually unfolding across half the engineering organizations in the country right now. They ran the same experiment Uber ran, most of them without Uber's $3.4 billion R&D cushion to absorb the surprise, and almost none of them having modeled the heavy-user tail or instrumented the gap between tokens consumed and value shipped. The reckoning will arrive for each of them on their own fiscal calendar, and the first instinct will be the wrong one. The tool is too good to abandon, the bill is too large to absorb, and the only durable resolution runs through a question the entire rollout was designed to defer. > You cannot get labor-replacement economics out of a tool you deployed as a labor supplement, and the bill comes due before anyone is willing to admit which one they actually bought.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
- HDThoreaun 4mo ago
  I havent seen any evidence showing that subscriptions cost the labs money.
- eptcyka 4mo ago
  I pay a lot but barely use it except for some intense days, where the lower plans would have throttled me in like 30 minutes. API billing is still more expensive. If you want to not pay much, go to openrouter and use chinese models. They are cost efficient.
chinathrow 4mo ago
Yeah that payment scheme sounds like they gear up to shift everyone into API token prices, eventually. Time to convert the existing tokens into software, until then.
toomuchtodo 4mo ago
Mythos-class models will diffuse throughout the world by 2029 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498512 - June 2026