I am so sick of subscriptions for AI products | Hacker News Reader

I am so sick of subscriptions for AI products

13 pointshitsy009 comments

I know that these AI products don't cost much since GPT 40mini is so damn cheap. I need to do 4000 one hour long video summaries in a month to pay off 10 Dollar subscription that Glasp and Eightify charge me.

Why are we not seeing more Lifetime products wiht Bring your own key seems like the most logical business model to me. Yes it is low margin business but it makes a lot of sense no?

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There is actual, live compute costs every time you submit a prompt, and they're not unsubstantial. If you're not paying for them on your own hardware, you have to rent someone else's hardware to do it on a token-by-token basis or all-you-can-eat-basis. There is no way to save or cache any of this because it all works by predicting what comes next after the entire corpus plus your newly-written prompt. Unless you have that entire model stored, you can't do the calculation.

So I am talking about allowing users to bring their own keys. Business model like Typemind.

You could try that, but I think 99% of SaaS owners would rather have 10 monthly subscriptions than 100 lifetime key owners. There isn't a huge incentive to split out your product into it's constituent parts when you can market the whole thing and charge full price. This doesn't just extend to AI, most API-based interfaces don't offer you a choice between your provider.

True. But my logic was that in an environment where SAAS is going hyperbole towards 0, this would be a great way to set ourselves apart. Oir product is definitely better than most of our competitors. But this could be a way to sink the costs entirely and set ourselves apart from our competitors.

Allowing a user to bring their own key to a backing LLM over-complicates the product for the developer. Now, instead of managing your account with them, they also have to manage your account with the LLM provider, and they will be restricted by the limits of that account. They can't take advantage of any economy of scale by using their own keys and accounts. It's a huge mess and security nightmare to hold keys for other users and usually not worth it, unless that itself is your business.

I actually had the exact same thought. Obviously it's in their best interest to charge you a subscription, since then you pay forever, but there are some options out there. The one I use (called Horsy Chrome) is a bit new, discovered it through an AI newsletter I subscribe to, and they offer lifetime deal: https://horsy.ai/gallop.

In terms of product, I actually prefer it to the competitor products you already mentioned. I suggest you check them out. I personally would love it if more products were this way, and there are some websites out there specifically dedicated to software products with lifetime deals (e.g. appsumo), so who knows, maybe this is a trend!

What is the name of the AI newsletter?

IIRC it was trends.vc but I am subscribed to many such newsletters, not 100% sure

Ya know, there is such a thing as self hosting on your own rig.

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