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Comment by joshuafuller | Hacker News Reader

This feels a lot like the same playbook we’re seeing with dynamic pricing in retail, just applied to compute instead of products. You never really know what you’re getting, and the rules shift under you.

What makes it worse is the lack of transparency. If there were clear, hard limits, people could plan around it. Instead it’s this moving target that makes it impossible to trust for real work.

At some point it stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a pricing experiment on users.

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The clear trend over the past decade or so has been using analytics and data gathering to extract maximum rents from every customer in every industry and AI is going to massively accelerate this.

The only way out is government regulation which means we are screwed in the US (our government is too far gone to represent average citizen interests in any meaningful way) but Europeans maybe have a chance if they get it together and demand change.

It's been pretty clear for a while that companies who have developed foundation models have essentially unprecedented levels of investment to recoup. For all the talk of faster hardware and more efficient models, that spend hasn't gone away and ultimately that investment needs to get a return somewhere.

Dependency on cloud AI models is, in effect, dependency on VC subsidy. From the user's point of view, this dependency is debt which will either be repaid with interest to a model provider or through the hard work of making themselves independent of such models after having become dependent.

Wow, someone here has above a room temp IQ.

What a horrid glimpse in the future. I hope we won't get there and we all collectively fight back with our wallets.

I'm worried that the present is actually living off a line of credit that will be spent/closed soon.

It's going to get much worse. We're soon going to have enough data and compute (and are losing enough online privacy) to allow every company to apply personalized pricing down to the individual. My local restaurant is going to know that I am willing to buy a burger for at most $4.57 and my neighbor is only willing to pay $2.91 for it, and they will have the ability to charge us individually. Every business is going to soak each of us us to the maximum extent that the data says they can.

Who would voluntarily do business with a company that does this? Not me.

Eventually, when all of them do this (and they will be effectively forced to in order to remain competitive), then we will not have a choice.

I will make burgers myself. I take this approach with many things and services without great suppliers anyway. And I don't care if it's suboptimal because, in the long run, I'll have better skills and be protected from exactly this trend.

But the supermarkets will do it too

The prices are literally marked on the shelves.

Today, yes. I can imagine a future where that sticker is replaced with an electronic display, and facial rec shows you an individualized price.

You don't think customers are going to figure that out by talking to each other and comparing prices on the spot?

Do you ever talk to other humans IRL?

Everyone who uses Uber is voluntarily doing business with a company that does this. When was the last time you took an Uber?

Do you use Uber, Lyft, or Doordash?

What about airlines? https://fortune.com/2025/07/16/delta-moves-toward-eliminatin...

What about Staples or Home Depot? https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189...

Then your neighbor can charge you up to $1.65 to buy a burger on your behalf and you still get it cheaper.

How can you compete when the algorithms are custom, individualized, and private? How would you even know that you should?

Not competition, but more like an opportunity for a startup to build a solution that fits in the new gap. A marketplace for people to sell their discounts.

I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that this is discriminatory. Certainly it’s not something I would tolerate as a consumer. I suspect there will be heavy pressure to regulate this practice out of existence if it catches on.

who is going to stop them? the consumer protection bureau?

Depends what the political attitudes are where you live. The EU is unlikely to let it fly for example.

That’s what you get when you sign contracts in airline reward miles

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