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Comment by retired | Hacker News Reader

> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits

In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children.

It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.

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I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).

The Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")

Another weird cultural quirk of the Dutch that will hopefully go the way of Zwarte Piet one day.

From what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.

A semi-skilled English-speaking customer service agent in PH makes less than $700 a month to put this into perspective.

Working abroad is a totally reasonable proposition compared to working in the Philippines.

The added cost of having an additional person to provide room and food for way exceeds that €300/month. Especially, when taking into consideration that you might have to extend/renovate the house to lodge another person. Adding an extra bedroom and possibly bathroom is not cheap.

Even if you assume the cost of lodging was 1000€ (which it isn't) then the au-pair would still be significantly underpaid.

A normal full time employee costs at least 2000€ a month (salary, tax, pension plan, health insurance, etc). If you are paying less than that you are definietly exploiting them.

So in reality you’re paying for their food, electricity and heat, letting them rent a room for free, and allowing them the use of the other facilities in your home and on top of that you’re giving them a spending allowance of 300 euro.

In fact, you could do this for a homeless person today, in any city on the globe! And never even ask them to do anything for you!

The marginal cost of food/electricity/bed for adding one additional person to a family is drastically less than those things would cost for a person living alone. Whichever way you slice this, the employer is making out like a bandit under this scheme.

We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.

The concept of having this kind of help is totally foreign to me, but with the exception of one, every family I’ve encountered that had an au pair have been two very busy high earning parents, neither of them lazy. I think you could argue that perhaps priorities have been misplaced, but not lazy.

Surely that’s subsidized?

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.

They aren't selling it to the median US earner. They're selling it (and trying to generate FOMO) to the out of touch people so that it becomes so entrenched that the median earner will be forced to use it in some capacity through their interaction with businesses, schools, the government, etc.

The customer they’re picturing in their mind’s eye is obvious. The out of touch part comes in when you look at the size of that market— not big— with how likely that market is to grow drastically— not very— and the amount they’re investing in building the product— all of everything plus a bazillion. With what they’ve invested, if they end up with an institutional market the likes of Microsoft split up among the winners, they fucked up.

The economics of these businesses are based way more on hope and hype than rational analysis and planning.

Realistically you certainly don’t Anthropic’s models for those things and can get something for a fraction of the price on OpenRouter/etc.

Wow. I'd expect that from Singapore or UAE but finding it happen in a fairly developed Western country is a surprise.

Machines don't get tired, don't have to sleep, don't face principal-agent problems and can accumulate Skill.md instructions for decades without getting replaced. I definitely see the potential of something like OpenClaw for those who can afford it.

You're paying the au pair partly in accommodation, food, bills and a visa. The visa isn't coming out of your bank account, but it's definitely part of the incentive, so you could see it as a government subsidy.

For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that

What a horrible situation.

How is that remotely possible without committing enormous violations of labor law?

Framed this way - then “replacing” this kind of human exploitation is definitely a good for humanity. If someone doing a job is practically a slave, then replacing them with an electron to token converter is a good thing.

The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation. We want robots mining the minerals we use for our phones, not children. We should strive to free all of humanity from dangerous labour and the need for such jobs to exist.

If Elon Musk wants Optimus robots to help colonize Mars shouldn’t he be trying to create robots that can mine cobalt or similar minerals from dangerous mines and such?

> The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation.

I have some bad news.

I doubt this is true in .nl. 180 a month is low for a live-in au-pair.

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that.

And you see nothing wrong with that?

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