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mrweasel | on: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
The problem isn't really Uber, Microsoft or Nvidia, it's all the smaller none IT companies that also have developers on staff. They are screwed. $1500 per seat per month is just way to expensive, but they also can't afford to build and maintain their own on-premise solution. If Microsoft can't afford to run CoPilot for their own developer, what chance does any of their customers stand?

If the large, well founded IT companies in the world believes the current AI cost is to high, then Anthropic, OpenAI and CoPilot have no actual customer base. AI is then relegated to very profitable niche business, but that can't fund the R&D for the models.

skybrian | parent | next
It's an extra 18k a year for developer tools when they're paying how much a year per developer? Having software developers at all isn't cheap.

Also, I don't believe you need to spend $1500 a month on a coding agent if you optimize usage at all.

KronisLV | root | parent | next
In Latvia, the net salary for a Java dev is around 1729 - 4314 EUR, based on https://www.algas.lv/algu-informacija/informacijas-tehnologi... (crowd sourced data)

For the employer those employees cost between 2945 - 7736 EUR per month based on https://kalkulatori.lv/lv/algas-kalkulators (income and social taxes).

So on the lower end that's (1500 USD ~ 1300 EUR) close to half the total expenses of such a developer, on the high end here around 15-20%. That's quite significant, depends on whether their productivity also improves (if that's what the orgs care about).

And we’re not even the country with the worst pay out there, but pay the same for tokens, cause regional pricing isn’t a thing!

skybrian | root | parent
I wonder how this plays out. Perhaps programmers in these countries will use cheaper models like Deepseek and they will be able to compete better, so offshoring continues?
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ecshafer | root | parent | next
$18k a year is a non starter in most companies. Ive seen companies balk at Intellij.
mrweasel | root | parent
That depends on where you are. $18K is the equivalent of paying around 15% more for your developer.
ricardobayes | root | parent
In hcol locations yes, but in south of spain you can get full time talent for that figure. It's also an entry-level salary in eastern europe, with ukraine and turkey even being somewhat cheaper.
treis | parent | next
There's models for every price point. What was SOTA and stupid expensive to run a year ago is a cheap flash model today.
mvdtnz | parent
Why are smaller non-IT companies "screwed" because they can't pay out the nose for their developers' AI usage? They're non-IT companies, developers are presumably not on their critical path, or not their bottleneck. Developers can keep on writing code the old way, or doing it with a more reasonable AI spend. I don't see how this "screws" any company.
mrweasel | root | parent
That was badly worded on my part, my intend was to indicate that there was no way they can or will pay $1500 per month per seat.
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