Hacker News Reader

Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

yep, all those coders paying $200-$500 per day to use claude once subsidy ends will be seriously rethinking how much they really want to vibe-code "rewriting X in rust". Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either.

View on HN

> Helping people write word docs, recipes, and emails isn't going to justify $15K per month subscriptions either.

Those things can all be done today on a $250 used video card and pennies of electricity

Not really. Models that can run on a $250 card may be able to produce a decent word doc sometimes, but the fidelity of such models is so poor that it's no longer very attractive for general use on those types of tasks.

i might have agreed with you 4 months ago, but today with open source models i am surprised as anyone with the progress compared to frontier... so much so that i also picked up one of those $250 cards!

Then I buy a very expensive GPU rack and timeshare it with a couple of friends.

Have you tried qwen3.6-27b or Gemma 4? gemma4-26b-a4b is particularly impressive for its balance of speed and performance

The subscription is certainly subsidized but its no where near 100x cheaper than API prices.

Heck, most large enterprise moved to usage based billing and are still happily paying for it. They are force multipliers for your top talent, and when a top engineer is being paid $500k a year, doubling their output for $500/day is a no brainer.

Yes, it's close to 100x and it's easy to calculate this.

Take a $10 claude sub and fill it with Fable/Opus for a month (meaning use all your tokens) and then use one of the many token/session recording tools (I like agentsview).

It will show you how much your token cost is at current rates if using an api. I use the $20 plan and I don't use all my tokens, and am around 50x.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com