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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.

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> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where

Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.

The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.

On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.

> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.

Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware.

Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.

> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests.

LLM costs are already pretty cheap (regardless of whether someone believes they'll continue falling).

For a recent example, see a relatively powerful LLM like DeepSeek Flash, where you can get a million tokens for $0.20. And if someone is OK with their task being batched (instead of executing it right now), that can lower prices too.

Inference price trends in previous years: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

Even in the best case, a potential customer is going to request quotes from several suppliers and only pick one.

Those businesses are welcome to publish their prices if they want to avoid that

Not really practical for custom work.

At some places I've worked, we still get a quote anyway. This may come as a shock to the purchasing team, maybe not, but it's always come back with the price on the website. Just the SOP for us I guess

You have to show the bean counters the quotes/bids you received and justify why one was used over the other when the cheapest option wasn't used. You can't put "price on the website" into the bean counter's files.

Makes sense

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