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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

$30/user/mo on top of normal google workspace per-user pricing seems like a lot for this. Is it really that good, or is google just trying to cash in on the AI hype train?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849457/google-duet-ai-d...

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By comparative pricing, if this is an equivalent of ChatGPT Enterprise + Plugins, you can take the ChatGPT plus pricing which is public at $20/user/mo and this doesn't look that bad.

Assuming business user features and SLAs + deep integration with all of your google workspace are worth the additional $10/user/mo, doesn't sound that bad for a "today" price and until someone undercuts this.

I think they're actually either signaling they think Bard is less good than ChatGPT with this pricing, or they really wanted to undercut ChatGPT enterprise as early as possible, because althought I haven't seen OpenAI's private pricing I doubt they'd be selling for under $30/m, and you'll have way more work trying to piece together plugins and paying 3rd party vendors to replicate "summarize this google drive folder for me into a slide deck" type stuff.

Yeah, but Google's LLMs are notoriously bad compared to even the free tier of ChatGPT, unless I've missed something.

Bard has certainly become better over the past few months, and while as a product it is worse in some ways (seems to have a purposefully low understanding of the previous context in a chat) it is up to date with somewhat current information, unlike GPT where you need to pay money to access its web browsing capabilities.

I want to use the best tool and every time there is a Bard update I fire up it and try my last few GPT queries and not once have I had reason to switch.

I will switch the second it is better, but for the coding tasks I need done GPT is improving rapidly and Bard is just falling further behind.

At some point I’ll stop comparing unless I hear of some crazy breakthrough.

They think this is more valuable than all of the other existing Google Workspace features? Because it's more expensive than all of them AFAIK...

Pricing options:

$10/month = "Must not be as good as ChatGPT"

$20/month = "Why would I pay for this new thing when I can get ChatGPT for the same amount?"

$30/month = "They must think this is better than ChatGPT." (and they'll give discounts on the back end)

I mean, when your product is inferior, those really are your choices

I don't think that you can compare it to chat gpt like that.

Consider that companies will also be paying for having this integrated to the current tools that employees are using in workspace, will not be a new tool for employees, will be a feature.

And also will not be a new bill to pay for financial teams. For IT admins will be a switch on their control panel, nothing new to have control of the tool for their employees.

"$30, at least for large organizations."

Hopefully they'll make it like $5-$10 for small teams.

Or maybe not 'hopefully'. If they don't, a better and cheaper alternative will probably appear. LLMs are slowly being commoditized, thankfully.

> LLMs are slowly being commoditized

nah there will always be demand for the best one

Matches Microsoft pricing for Copilot, smart.

i didn't realize copilot pricing was that high too. google's pricing makes a lot more sense with that context.

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