Why is that? The $200 per month subscription comes with a ton of usage.
Opus 4.6 is available on the $20 plan too
Opus 4.6 is available on the $20 plan too
$200 dollars + VAT is half of my rent.
I know HN is not a good place to rant on this subject, but I'm often flabbergasted about the number of people here that lives in a bubble with regard to the price of tech. Or just prices in general.
I remember someone who said a few years ago (I'm paraphrasing): "You could just use one of the empty room in your house!". It was so outlandish I believed it was a joke at first.
EDIT: "not", minor grammar
I think I am in the middle. I can afford $200/m but it'd be a brainer. And I don't pay that as I barely use home AI enough to warrant it.
I am also amazed at the richer end of HN but now I realize I am priviledged. Earned it? Like fuck I did. Lucky to be born a geek in late 20c. I'd be useless as a middle ages guy.
Subscriptions are definitely middle-class targeted. $20/month is not much for the value provided, at least not in the western world.
But if by "rich" you just mean "westerners", then in this sense, the same is and has always been true for computing in general.
So like if you want to start a business of any sort the AI sub is still peanuts.
AI is a car, or a dog, or a mild social life, or a utility bill level of cost. And thats for the level needed for a sane typical developer. (AI maximalists need 250k/y, let them slop it out)
It is not a Cessna, an infinity pool or a 1 month vacation.
Last year, at first, $200 seemed crazy. Now that I’m getting addicted to coding agents, not so much. Some companies are paying API rates for AI for employees, and it’s a lot more than $200/mo. It seems like funny money, and I’m not sure it’ll last.
> most people in the US and EU, $200 would be closer to 15%-20% of rent I think?
> the average rent is north of $1000/mo.
I really don't know where you get your number from, $1000/mo average is really wild to me. With this amount, you can rent a flat for a whole family in the heart of the city. Nobody of my more well-of friends have a rent this high.
Or maybe you have some capital city in mind like Paris or London?
The salaries are good in SCV, but the local economy is calibrated to absorb the money in proportion.
I googled it. According to Google, London’s average rent is around €2,700, around 3x higher than the average. I assume the number of people living there and paying that much balances against the number of people like you living in smaller towns and rural areas who are paying lower rents.
But yes, rents have become very high everywhere. I live in a medium sized city in the US not anywhere near a coast, and most kids attending the local university are paying over $1000/mo for a 1-bedroom place. The primary way to get cheaper rent is to have flat-mates, try to get 3 or 4 people into a place that rents for, say, $2500/mo.
I was paying $2k/mo in San Francisco 25 years ago for a place that was maybe 90m^2, and since then rents have gone way up. Google says the average now is just under $4k/mo. In some nicer neighborhoods, some people pay $8k/mo for a single bedroom. This big-city rent in SF, LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, etc. balances against the small towns in the US where you can find a room for $500/mo, which is why the average is above $1k.
Even the US has places with cheap rent/housing. The downside is that there's no (well-paying) work nearby.
You’re technically correct, btw, rental housing is a market and is subject to market forces, meaning what people are willing to pay. I’m just not so sure about framing rent as being lower priority than other necessities. And rent prices have been increasing faster than other necessities, and faster than income, so that might be a confounding factor in your argument.
Still, my initial reaction above is due to the fact that in the US and in Europe in most large cities, the average rent is north of $1000/mo.
Because I'm from a country where 30 years ago average income was $220/month. Today it's $2475/month.
A large portion of people live in the same houses and apartments now as people did back then. The housing hasn't changed, but today renting a 70 sqm apartment costs you $800/month - the same apartment that people in 1996 lived in with their $220 monthly wage.
The reason why I think that housing is "lower priority" when setting a price is because the sale/rent price for housing is more divorced from the "manufacturing cost" compared to other goods. This happens for a number of reasons:
1. Housing scales with money. Most people live well beyond the "minimum required" for housing. You could survive living in a tiny room with a shared bathroom, but most of us want more than that. Compare this to food - rich and poor people will drink a similar amount of milk. You can't really spend 100x on milk and actually get appreciable benefits from doing so. You can with housing. (Same goes for most other goods. A $3 million car is not 100x better than a $30k car, it's not even 10x better.)
2. Housing is non-fungible. You can't have two houses in the same location. Food, furniture, and electronics are fungible.
3. Housing doesn't depreciate with use compared to other goods. You drink milk and it's gone. You drive your car and it degrades. Your house degrades simply by existing - your use of it will degrade it a little, but living in it also means you do maintenance, like cleaning, that will help keep its value.
4. Because of the above, housing is an asset that people invest in. This is a bit circular, but it also means a lot of people don't want to see housing become cheaper.
>And rent prices have been increasing faster than other necessities, and faster than income, so that might be a confounding factor in your argument.
Because the cost to produce other necessities hasn't increased as quickly as incomes have increased. We have better technology and better economies-of-scale that has made the cost of other goods cheaper. Now people have more money left over to pay for rent, so they do.
I used the wrong word, btw. The word I meant to use was ‘discretionary’ income. I think that’s what you’re suggesting, that rent is discretionary? ‘Disposable’ income is what’s left after taxes, but ‘discretionary’ income is defined as being what’s left after paying for things like rent, transportation, food, and utilities (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discretionaryincome.asp)
It’s true the amount one spends on rent is a bit elastic, and that is also true for most consumer goods. The problem with your argument is that rent is not optional, like most consumer goods are. There are very few things that one cannot go without paying for at all, and rent is one of those.
If I understand correctly, what you’re suggesting is the reverse of how most people including economists think of rent. This discussion does depend heavily on what “other goods” you’re actually talking about. Can you provide more concrete examples, and show that they really are getting less expensive over time? Is your hypothesis supported by Eurostat’s HICP or the World Bank’s data on inflation and consumer prices?
So yes, you describe a situation that I feel like a lot of people here don't understand is not the norm.
I compared the subscription with my rent precisely because it's easier to compare: with your numbers it would be like paying from $600 up to $1500 / month. Pretty hard to justify.
Are you not a dev? If not, what would you use a coding tool for? They still require handholding for anything largeish. Still much cheaper than outsource.
But it's not all that relevant to this conversation. It's not like this is the first time economic inequality is a thing.
It's just as relevant to me factoring in your salary the next time I go buy a car.
Also, I think it's relevant to the conversation.
You replied to someone who said that "you" (undirected pronoun I suppose) can't afford the SOTA that the $200/month Anthropic subscription comes with a ton of usage. So I interpreted it as a general statement. It wasn't what you meant?
I'm a bit lost about who you're talking to/about in your first comment: the person you respond to, a general statement for everyone reading, or yourself?
Going back to the $20 plan, yes, I agree it's much more accessible.
I didn't talk about it because I've seen a lot of comments here, on blogs, on social media about how a $200 subscription for Claude is a no brainer. And it got on my nerves, so I wanted to tell how much money it can be. To you (and it was misguided reading your answers), and to concerned HN commenters in general.
If it's that I'm not working, well, I'm employed.
It it's that I'm not working enough to not have this money... Well, we still go back to the bubble. Not everywhere in the world you can easily find a job that pays you enough, even if you accept to work more. And the employer will not accept to give developers a $200/month subscription, even less for personal use.
If it's that I'm not working enough and I should go freelancing to work as much as I want and get rich (I'm extrapolating). Well, you're right, I could do that. But (at least at first), I would work a lot more for much less money. And even if I become a recognized freelancer, it doesn't change the fact that I'll earn less money compared to the baseline of SF, or even the USA in the tech sector in general. So, bubble again. I could also, like someone said, put the tokens cost into my hourly/daily rate, but I'll be much more expensive than other freelancers.
Also, but that's a "me case" compared to my previous points, health issues can greatly affect how much work you can do.
Do you have any evidence of that? I think the OPs are assuming this as a premise so their logic is probably valid but may not be sound logic for you.
Instinctively, if we suppose all the newbies freelancers without any reputation start with the same lowest rate possible to be competitive, passing additional cost to my client will mechanically increase my rate. Putting me in disadvantage about getting any work. And with the difference of monetary value for the same price of tokens, the rate delta is higher.
It's a simplified model of the world, but it feels like simple economic rules.
I assume the comment I'm referring to was written by someone who is already established and for Wich the token cost passing is lower relatively to my environment.
Also, I don't think I was aggressive?
Sorry, no. You live in the bubble, the people you think are living in a bubble are actually doing the very opposite and taking advantage of the lack of bubbles in our globally connected world.
Today, basically anyone can sell any bullshit to billions of people around the world. We’ve never lived in less of a bubble.
$200/month is, but you don't need that for anything except beyond-casual use of coding agents.
I didn't say "only SF can afford $200/mo".
You didn’t say that until now.
I think you’re wrong, SF being particularly good for big companies might indicate something if the conversation was about succeeding at a grand scale, not about being able to afford $200/mo
But I run a AI SaaS and we do offer Opus 4.6, too. Our use case is not nearly as token intensive as something like coding so we are still able to offer it with a good profit margin.
Also you can run OpenClaw with your CC subscription. It's what I do.
Edit: I'm not using the term of art, I mean it literally cannot make them money.
Sorry, how do these two things go together?
If people pay for it, it has economic utility, doesn't it? I mean, people pay to watch movies or play video games, too.
I'd not use it over pure Claude Code because I am at heart a coder and I want the raw terminal experience and there's some features missing from the "Code" tab in Claude Desktop, but just saying "a subscription to code", just goes to show how out of touch that person already is, and that's what resistance does to you when you try to resist making use of any kind of modern tooling or technology.
They cane take that away from you at any time for any reason, make it too expensive, etc.
A working PC with a Linux distro has been enough and should be enough. Everything else is a time bomb.
200 USD/month is a number only really affluent programmers (e.g. in the Silicon Valley) can perhaps pay easily.
Not true, I live in USA PNW and my last remote job paid $12k/mo. I have been jobless for over a month now (currently waiting for the next HN "who wants to be hired"), but I still have enough savings to easily afford to continue that plan for a while.
I don't think it really has to do with affluence but more the job market and economy you're in. Countries with lower salaries or higher costs of living will have less buying power.
But I like to have that forced hour to stop, it’s moment to take a breath.
It depends on the kind of work though, some things are more token intensive.