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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

Google Ultra: USD 250. Claude Pro: 218 EUR ChatGPT Pro: 220 EUR

Not included: Perplexity, Openrouter, Cursor, etc

Wow. You gotta have lots of disposable income.

The target market for these offerings are corporations, or self-employed developers. If these tools really do make your developers more productive, $250 a month is easily justifiable. That's only $3000 per year, a fraction of the cost of a full time developer.

Obviously, the benefit is contingent on whether or not the models actually make your developers more productive.

Yup, I was paying $225/mo for three Unity3D subscriptions (basic+iOS+Android) ten years ago, while earning less than $4k/mo – just considered it part of my self-employed expenses.

Do any of these companies actually sell their products as developer replacements?

No, but they do sell them as developer augmentations.

Interesting because that post was comparing the cost directly to a developer salary.

I hear it doesn't have to be productive right now, if you have deep pockets it is worth being familiar with the tools even if it is just in case.

$250 a month is still a lot of money in India to spend on a digital product.

AI has completely eliminated salary adjusted pricing in software. no discounts for 3rd world in anything.

This isn't a luxury purchase. If you aren't able to increase your income by $250/mo using these tools or otherwise get $250/mo worth of value out of them then you shouldn't sign up.

that $250/month can make you $20k/month if you do some automation and subjectively unethical things

Like taking on a gazillion of contract work?

Apart from clients that usually are not stupid, you still need to understand requirements to guide the ai in a possible right direction. I don't usually understand boss tickets at first look, very often we need to discuss them, i doubt an ai could despite the hype

There are enough people who do. ;)

And from a business perspective, this is enabling people from solo freelancers to mid managers and others for a fraction of the time and cost required to outsource to humans.

Not that I am personally in favor of this, but I can very much see the economics in these offerings.

The goal is to capture all your disposable AI income, so they can starve the competitors. The goal is, as long as you subscribe to several, increase the price.

And you haven’t strung the price that stings yet.

And this is still early days, the pre-enshittification era.

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