I think the bigger issue (like many things in software engineering) is a management issue. Once upon a time, I could take a look at the final output of a project and if it looked like a Ferrari on the outside, I could have some confidence that there was a good engine under the hood. OF COURSE THIS WASNT ALWAYS TRUE, but something that looked good, or was performant, or whatever, was a decent proxy for the code underneath being good. And with a smart human, there were ancillary things. Having spent 20 hours coding something, they probably thought through the edge cases that their manager, or product team hadn’t considered.

With AI, everyone’s output looks like a Ferrari, so it is hard to know what the internals are like.

A lot of people will probably look at this and say “well you need better management”, but better management has always been elusive in software engineering. Furthermore, reviewing AI generated code is soul crushing work and I don’t know who wants to do it.

In my guesstimate the number of good engineering managers out there is actually very very small and in practice, the best managers that I’ve seen are the ones who don’t think they are good managers, so they just set a very high hiring bar and hire people who don’t need much management.

I have worked with many lawyers in my career. The bad ones will look at a contract and tell you fifty things that can be improved. Meanwhile, you take the same contract to a really great lawyer and they tell you that's it's not worth fighting over the changes and to just keep it as is. It's kind of like how a beginner or intermediate software engineer might tell you how you can build out a k8s or auto-scaling fargate cluster for your project and a really senior engineer might look at the same thing and explain that it's not worth worrying about scalability right now.

I find that when I feed contracts to ChatGPT (which I do all the time) it will try to find 50 things wrong with it. For example, as a test, i fed chatgpt an employment offer from a US government agency. It came back with 1152 words and 14 recommended (some of them substantial) changes. Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.

That might not be due to the contents but rather due to the fact that they won't negotiate I'd presume

I definitely understand the appeal of the desire to “buy it once”, but I think there are a few issues:

- almost no software is static. Look at a package like python Requests and even though it does the simplest thing and has barely changed from a user perspective, it gets updated all the time. This is true for most software. This is doubly true for something like local AI models where both the software and the hardware are changing constantly. Subscriptions motivate sellers to keep their software up to date.

- If I’m an app developer, the idea that I can try something out for $X/month is very appealing versus making an upfront investment of (let’s say) $X*20. This is doubly true for something like local models where I will almost certainly want something new when the models improve.

- To add to the first point, I work at a startup. No one asks questions when I want $20/month licenses. But let’s say I want something that’s gonna be in the 5 figure range annually. If I go to my CFO and ask for $50k upfront and then we implement something and the project fails, I look like an idiot. If I ask for $2000/mo budget for something and then we try it for two months and it fails, no one cares. Subscriptions are just safer in this sense.

- All compiled software is static. New versions are released. I'm happy to pay for new versions/features if I want/need them. But if the version I have is working offline, it doesn't need security updates, and if it does what I need, it doesn't need new features. Same applies if I'm building software for others, if the library does what I need for my software for my customers and I need nothing more off the dev, why should I keep paying the dev?

- I'm struggling not be sarcastic here, sorry, but this might shock you to hear: most humans find the idea of being able to try whatever they want and get paid for it appealing. That's not really how money or life works though.

- I don't know how to respond to this point, it's a bit of a strawman. Yes, if the only other option is to pay $50k up front for a local model, then your point is valid.

As a kid, I spent literally hundreds of £ on the first Sims, and Sims expansion packs at £20 /pop. EA got loads of money off me, I got loads of new features I wanted. I moaned at the time, but on reflection, everyone was a winner. Sims is still going now (possibly as a subscription!)

Again, apologies for a bit of sass here (that's a me problem), but the number of people who seem to sincerely believe the points you've put forward is why I'm personally sad at the state of modern software economics.

You’re talking about times before 2010 and an EA game, but that’s not the right comparison. These Desert Ant AI models are an SDK, a professional middleware library. Licensing that kind of software in the pre-2010 days used to cost tens of thousands of dollars.

In other words, the proper comparison here is the various libraries that EA licensed to make the game, not the game itself.

> I don't know how to respond to this point, it's a bit of a strawman.

Why is it a strawman? I can sell you software for $100 once or I can sell it to you for $10/month. I don't think anyone is suggesting that I'm gonna sell it for $10 once though.

In particular, Desert Ant is saying their software is free for 100k active devices per SDK. That's likely a lot more users than most peoples' side projects. Given that, I'm guessing that $50k (even annually) is not a crazy number (yes, obviously $50k is not what a consumer would ever pay).

As in - I make software for a living and they can fuck off. Produce the item. Sell the item at a cost you find reasonable. Convince me to buy it again with an upgrade that's worth buying.

Period.

There's no "service" happening here. If anything, the proposed cost model just makes me incredibly unlikely to engage at all, because it means they're going to insist on trying to track my users (a thing I don't like doing...) with whatever bloatware they shove into their "sdk".

They're selling it to your employer. You're literally not even the customer for this product. There's no need to get angry that they're charging enterprise/vendor rates for a product.

And it's free for up to 100k devices. If you are running anything on 100k devices you should be able to afford $0.50/device and. If you aren't then why do you care? It's still a very customer-permissive and flexible business model so I cannot understand why this is upsetting or offensive

I deploy browser extensions to millions of devices, and small local models that I can run in that space are incredibly appealing.

But the "per user" model is just especially difficult to justify here, and comes with a TON of fucking downsides like usage tracking, feature availability, and product structure (ex - is a trial user a user? how long? etc...)

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And it's not even like they're justifying it with model download support or caching... they shove it entirely onto hugging face, or have you self serve.

As their literal target audience - I'd rather buy the weights for a fixed price (even a high one), and not let them influence my product design decisions with saas style pricing.

An alternative would be instead of 1 of charging over 100k users $50k, charge every user a one off $20.

I guess it's hard to discuss alternative billing methods without knowing what need to be recuperated.

Thanks for the response, appreciated. Again, sorry for the sassyness.

Initially, you picked the Multi-ZA RDS db.t3.2xlarge instance because you figured "eh i have credits anyway". Two years later, someone looks at this and says "hey, this is expensive and I bet we can do everything we need on a machine half the size". But then they think "if i downsize it and that works, i'll get a thumbs up emoji on a slack thread. If i downsize it and it causes problems, i'll draw the ire of the whole team. I better leave it alone." And the truth is... by the time your company hits the end of those credits, you're probably at the point where that savings isn't gonna do much. Or maybe you are out of business.

And that is how almost every successful company that uses AWS eventually ends up paying six-figures or more annually.

  > And that is how almost every successful company that uses AWS eventually ends up paying six-figures or more annually.

I literally just got my SOC2 compliance complete an hour ago, and I'm gonna roll out team plans/enterprise plans next week (unified billing + shared brands). For teams I'm gonna charge a flat 25% margin on API costs, and for enterprise I'll have a 50% margin + minimum spend.

I think I'm going to keep the individual plans at 0% though. Realistically until my own diffusion models I'm training are the main model I'm using for generation, I'm just an API wrapper + harness. At the individual level I want to be competitive with going directly to the api and coding your own harness.

I am curious though - what would you pay per image?

If I’m using this towards something that makes me money, I’d pay a lot more, but it really depends on context. In general, I’ll spend $5 like it’s nothing, $20 if it’s nothing and it’s for a business expense, and probably $50-100 for a design scheme for my (quite small) business. I don’t know that I’m a representative sample, but I’ll put my money where my mouth is, because I just added an extra $5 to play around more.

Btw, it’s a really innovative interface. It’s fun and very different from other tools I’ve seen. I quite like it but it’s also a bit confusing. Feel free to contact me if you want customer feedback (info in profile).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing / https://www.costplusdrugs.com

I know they probably intend it as "[Cost-plus] drugs", but I can't help but read it as "I'll do the job for you for the material cost, plus some drugs".

But “Drugs” wouldn’t be perfect…

Anyway no but now that you mention it maybe it’s too wonky of a name. Nothing better coming to the top of my head right now.

Sometimes models are vastly underpriced. Fable is an example. I can easily spend hundreds of dollars using it to code. On the other hand, if I'm looking for AI to review a contract for any obvious mistakes, I don't really care if I spend $0.01 vs $1.00, even if the difference is only marginal. I'll pay quite a bit more for something that's just a little bit better.

Same thing with design, in many cases. When the absolute dollar amounts are small, I'm happy to pay more for even marginally better quality.

- K-12, Academia/Colleges/Universities, Industry/Training, Adult learning, increasingly experts teaching directly, and more.

Most people aren't aware of the differentiation of the categories because they get to work inside one for the most part.

The learners in each category are different.

Duolingo had it's share of naysayers and doubters, but it did provide it's own take on a learning outcome.

Your post does make me wonder about the existing spend in Education, and how much could/should be EdTech with today's capabilities, or even the capabilities of 10 years ago, and what looking at that with a lens like yours might show, if anything.

To the parent commenter's point, we don't have enough information to know if that's true.

EDIT: the founder is on this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905) providing more info and explains that adding expenses on would be too burdensome.

Furthermore, a lot of my workflow is now done on remote servers (i love exe.dev) where claude code is sandboxed to an extent (it can still cause damage, just not to my main computer's file system). When I'm configuring those, i have a setup script that installs all of my vim files just the way i like them, so vim behaves exactly the same on a remote server as it does locally. I can edit things as needed. I can also access claude code on those servers as well. So working on my remote machine feels a lot like workin locally [1].

[1] I'm aware that i can setup cursor or vs code to access SSH servers, but it's just not as easy and doesn't feel as natural, IMO. There's something i like about needing to call `ssh remote-server` first.

I'm not defending the UN here, but I don't think that the Secretary General is the person who decided to put Google Tags on their website. I'd be shocked if he even vaguely knows what a Google Tag is.