Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about something: how far will you go to support AI? Clearly they'll need to monetize things further, would you still use [whatever AI you are paying for] if the price was doubled? Tripled? Where would you stop and would you stop using AI altogether or would you look at competitors?

View on HN

I will do nothing to “support” AI. Either it has utility or it doesn’t. I feel no loyalty or duty to help make it work if it doesn’t.

Anyway: Zero, as of right now.

I fully expect to be able to run useful LLMs on a machine I can justify buying for other reasons. I already can on the secondhand kit I own, and I don’t expect the cost-benefit analysis of local LLMs to ever really get worse.

If I ever need to pay for it, it will likely be to shift some of the capacity into the cloud for either business or pragmatic personal reasons (so I can just carry an iPad etc.)

I fully intend my expenditure to be negligible. Because once one realises that outspending others is impossible, only spending minimisation makes sense.

I foresee it potentially making sense for me to move some mature tools off a local LLM to openrouter, maybe. But probably to the same or similar models.

I don’t and won’t support AI. For a while I paid 200€ a month and would have been happy to pay up to maybe 600€. However I don’t want to participate anymore in using such an anti-human technology and industry

I pay for good tools that I use.

I spend 30 - 60 bucks a year with Horizon Labs.

I spend 25 bucks a month on Cursor. Cursor replaced an OpenAI sub.

Both support hobby projects. If either cost increased I would spend some time testing local alternatives and probably drop them.

Horizon Labs especially, I know that they have been matched by open models and are mostly a convenience at this point.

I’d easily pay multiple hundreds. Possibly a thousand a month.

If I were really forced to.

LLMs provide me about the same value as a car does.

I would probably still pay if the cost doubled, but I would also look at competitors, offline solutions, etc

We have benchmarks on our domain and it does there are models that are 2x to 10x cheaper for a small drop in percentage points in accuracy

Paying a thousand a month for a car is also very stupid.

Stretching the analogy, something that gets you from point A to point B for a fraction of the price without the same level of comfort is totally fine for me. For some of my tasks, that means using local models. For others it might mean a frontier-last-year kind of model. That's totally acceptable most of the time. For anything else I guess it's like renting a truck to move; just get the right vehicle as needed and pay the premium.

A $50k car used 1,000 miles per month probably costs close to a thousand per month, assuming 200k miles of life. I imagine this is not unusual in the US.

Is it smarter to totally cheap out and have an unreliable car that breaks down, stranding you, causing you to miss work though? If you're in a line of work that's customer facing, where having a beater of a car is going to hurt your job prospects? Without knowing the rest of the context, absolute statements based on absolute numbers is also dumb.

How many months is this car loan? What was the down payment? What's the interest rate? We haven't even asked what kind of car it is yet.

Cheap car =/= unreliable car. Expensive car =/= reliable car.

Agreed. For personal use it's already easily worth $100 a month (to me personally). More probably. For work, it's entirely based on its financial impact for a given role, and for some people/companies it will be worth the cost even at $X thousand per month per seat.

That's crazy. Can you provide some examples?

I’d pay thousands a month, if I had no cheaper choices, my productivity is now limited by the intelligence of AI, I’m basically a PM now.

What in the world are you working on?

I’m honestly just thinking about day to day utility in my personal life.

I've spent a grand total of $25 on AI ever, so apparently my answer is $25. But I'm not a big time software dev like the rest of you.

When I bought my last GPU, running AI models locally was a consideration though not the only one, and I have it set up but haven't used it much yet. I mostly use the free tiers of ChatGPT or Google to write the occasional script for me. I guess they're going to have to inject a truly unfathomable number of ads to get their money's worth.

I have a feeling my experience is closer to an average persons' than a dev, but it doesn't seem like they'll be able to monetize just from devs even if each one is spending thousands a month.

I'm not a coder but now work way faster than the coder I pay, stuff breaks but it's tenable and it's easier to get things to completion as the harnesses get better.

Don't give up just keep trying you can truly build personally life changing things. Don't look at it purely from a how do I sell this lense, just empower yourself with these tools while the getting is good

I have made life changing things with it, just not anything so life changing I'd consider paying more than $25. Stingy bastard, I am.

I hear you there.... too many years on my side paying over priced tools for the agencies, I'm well normalized on monthly subs and you can't compare these things to what we used to pay for. I've dropped 90% of the tools I used to sub to. But like others downstream have said no ones ever going to pay 500 to 1000 month open source models will just eat that margin up and flip the economics so ads it is lol.

I make an important distinction between cloud services and local AI. My lifetime spending on cloud AI is probably less than $500, and I don't intend to spend any more. But I've already dropped $2.5k on new hardware for local inference, and could easily see myself spending more in the future. In fact, I'm regularly browsing for deals. I would also be open to paying for local models, if there was a way to make that compatible with fully open models.

AI is so important, I want to have it under my control. Even if I have to pay a penalty in terms of capabilities.

Max 60 bucks a month. More than that and I'd just move to local qwen 35b or some other cheaper model on openrouter.

It depends on how much time it saves me and how much I make per hour generally, right?

If AI allows me to cut my time to do something in half on average or allows me to do 2x more it would be worth it to pay up to what my monthly income was before assuming my income scaled with my output.

> assuming my income scaled with my output

The problem is that hasn’t been the case for 50 years

I suppose it could be if you did freelance or your own business.

Well probably your income will decrease slightly as your field gets automated. So you'll output twice the much for the same effort and make a bit less money.

For personal use not more than 30$/month.

For work, it depends, but if I have to spend more than a few hundreds bucks probably I'll start looking for alternatives (local models, Chinese providers, ecc)

PS: I'm in Italy, I guess in several parts of the world these figures are even smaller.

Businesses know exactly how much they make or save thanks to AI. Take your hourly wage and count how many hours you save, and you know what it's worth to you. People who use AI for real world tasks would probably mostly accept double or even triple.

I don’t think there’s a single person out there that will ‘support’ AI

Maybe it’s just your phrasing but people will only pay for what works, no one is loony enough to support a trillion dollar industry out of the kindness of their heart or spirit of innovation

Zero. It provides no value to me.

Never paid a cent, never will pay a cent. I have my principles.

It may put me at a disadvantage when it comes to quickly slop something together? But so far the free-to-use chat bots do as well for my needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com