Comment by benwills | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benwills | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, Opus 4.6 cost three credits. You can no longer use 4.6 or 4.5.

Opus 4.7 is available today for 7.5 credits per prompt.

They have also suspended new signups.

After testing all of the major IDEs/tools that integrate with LLMs over the last four weeks, I was happy to settle on Copilot. I, and others, seem to be a lot confident in that decision. Especially since there seems to be no refund path for people who prepaid for a year.

In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.

I'm really curious where all of this lands, and if AI coding tools will be something that only a small percentage can genuinely afford at a competitive level.

> In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.

Warning: baseless speculation/theorizing ahead.

This is the consequence of LLM inference being really expensive to run, and LLM inference companies being really attractive to VCs. The VC silly money means their costs are totally decoupled from revenue for a while, but I guess eventually people look at incomings vs outgoings and start asking questions.

Previous big trends like SaaS apps, NFTs, blockchain etc were similarly attractive to VCs (for a period of time at least for the last two, the first one is still pretty attractive to VCs), but nowhere near as expensive to run so the behaviour of the companies running them wasn't quite the same.

AI is still in the "VCs subsidizing everything" -phase.

So:

- DO use AIs to build tools for yourself faster. If the AI goes away, the dashboard and scripts you made will still work.

- DO NOT build your business on top of 3rd party AI services with no way of swapping the backend easily. The question isn't whether there's going to be a "rug-pull", but when it happens. It might be sudden like this one or gradual where they just pump up the price like boiling a frog.

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