Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

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Awesome model from a quick run-through comparison, it's comparable in results to GPT-4 with web search and references as a plus, but runs faster. Two small nitpicks:

- Dark mode is hard to read, the answer text font has too much weight and brightness which makes it hard to read long paragraphs of non-code text. Light mode is obviously too bright overall, but it's already nighttime where I'm at so maybe tomorrow at noon I'll have another opinion. I'd preferred gray (dark, ie OpenAI) and sepia (light, ie HN) as backgrounds when long lines of text are involved.

- Pricing page and ties to GPT-4: what does "500+ best model uses per day (GPT-4)" mean? What's the "GPT-4" part for? I saw I can pick GPT4 as a model on the landing page, but I just don't get the best model/GPT-4 thing. Is Phind announcing it's a competitor but also proxies GPT-4? Sorry, I'm not up-to-date on GPT-4 "resellers" and the story behind Phind, it's just weird when it announces it "beats GPT-4" then the pricing is about GPT-4 usage.

Thanks for the feedback. We also support GPT-4 as an answering model so users can pick and choose what's best for their use case, but we recommend the Phind Model for the majority of users.

Why is there an 8x difference in price-per-search between Plus and Pro?

I always shy away from stuff like this because I view it as one of two things. Either I'm getting ripped off if I pay for Plus, because 8x the cost to me means your margin is huge, or I'm getting subsidized by you with the Pro version which means I can't rely on it lasting long term.

I also dislike daily limits for search. My search usage isn't uniform day-to-day. I might go most of the month without searching for anything and then do a ton of searching over 2-3 days when I'm trying to learn something. So I'll be idle most of the month and then not have enough searches on the days I actually want to use it.

I prefer the model used by a lot of pre-paid services. Let me deposit a chunk of money (ex: $20-50 minimum) and charge me per search until my money is gone. That way I'm not "losing out" if I don't use it every day and I can "burst" as high as I want when I'm trying to learn something.

If the pricing is based on a certain amount of loss (on my side) from the use-it-or-lose it model, I don't like that. I want simple, fair pricing, not a complex pricing scheme where the primary purpose is to get me to overpay for my usage.

Plenty of people know their upper limit. The ability to pay 50% less if that limit applies is a feature, not a bug. (This applies to any service -- I am not affiliated with phind except as an occasional user).

Phind Plus is $15/month and Phind Pro is $30/month. There is a 2x price difference, not an 8x difference. And Phind Pro comes with (virtually) unlimited GPT-4 uses.

We understand that the incentives of setting daily limits for search aren't great, which is why the Phind model is unlimited for free. GPT-4, however, is unfortunately too expensive for us not to charge past a certain usage threshold.

Plus costs $0.016 per search and Pro costs $0.002 per search.

https://www.phind.com/search?cache=wgyz13tg4jkbl9pklptmpds5

To me the $15/mo plan is just bait so users pick the target $30/mo month. Why would you pay $0.016/search when you can pay 8x less and feel smart about making that choice?

edit: looking at it again, I think the $15/mo is actually just for people who wants Phind "private", so that their data is not used for training.

Cost per search isn't really a great metric. For me, I hit the cap of 30 searches/day pretty easily, but 500 is pretty hard to hit. For me, its just a question of what tier matches my volume.

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