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Comment by oliviabenson | Hacker News Reader

You’re early and this is effectively a demo but just in case this is a blind spot: “token” is an in-the-weeds LLMism that means nothing in the context of transcription. Your costs may be measured in tokens but that’s not relevant to customers. Just “A free trial” with no quantifier would be better than 1k tokens.

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Appreciate the feedback, we'll take a look at that.

Great point. Someone needs to replace this measure.

Words? Minutes? Number of edits? Eg

Free - try 10 minutes active editing a month, great for trying it out

Light use - 120 minutes a month, perfect for jotting down a few things daily

Pro - 600 minutes a month, write an entire essay by voice

Ultra - unlimited. Make voice editing your main workflow and work 10 times faster

This is a great point and a topic I’ve been thinking about myself. As more LLM services pop up that are subject to token/consumption pricing, what is the right pricing model for consumer based consumption products like this?

Price based on value. Pricing is hard, something as simple as per-token is alluring because it doesn’t require any thought but it’s leaving a lot of money on the table. There’s nothing unique about LLMs when it comes to pricing, all common pricing wisdom applies.

That seems challenging to do with a writing/note taking app like this. First, what would the pricing tiers be based on? Word count? That would just be another way of saying token. Number of documents created? That puts you at risk of long unprofitable documents. Google Sheets doesn’t really have this problem because the incremental cost of storage is relatively cheap. Tokens on the other hand are not cheap.

How do you price based on value without a corollary to tokens? If you charged $40 for this service then maybe you don’t provide enough value for the casual user who does the occasional school report. On the other hand you may be unprofitable for the doctor that decides to dictate all of her interactions every day or the author who dictates an entire book.

> First, what would the pricing tiers be based on? Word count? That would just be another way of saying token.

A customer sees "word count", they understand what's going on perfectly, right away. Tokens? More than half of them will think "what, like, game tokens? do I have to buy them in advance?"

Generously, 10% of potential customers are going to have even an approximate idea of what a token means in this context, maybe 1% could tell you that words and tokens aren't quite the same thing.

Words. Just estimate how many tokens that'd be and talk in words, paragraphs, etc instead.

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