The world doesn't make sense to me. I use 5.6 Luna. Deepseek v4 flash 0731. And kimi k3. Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
China has cheaper electricity and a more capable grid for the industrial type usage levels they need to drive.
Electricity is a small part of the bill.
I wonder how long it'll be until they won't need to do that due to domestic options.
What bills? Deepseek has been profitable for long time.
Would be nice. I feel like the more you go towards the 3rd world (or tbh anywhere not in the US), the more this calculus shifts, probably all the way to underspecced workstations, no IDE licenses (e.g. JetBrains) and also no investment into tokens or whatever.
Also, 10k USD per year seems a bit low, I'm not tokenmaxxing but my non-subscription usage equivalent would be around 3000-6000 USD per month, though obviously with models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 it would be way more sensible compared to Anthropic.
2) with detailed, WELL NUMBERED (Claude is remarkably good at following number references), multi-level design and build documentation Claude absolutely CAN produce moderately complex applications (crud with some lightly branching business workflows).
The corollary to (2) however is can you actually get that working code to be production grade, AND maintain it? that far I haven't got yet.
But this is only possible because I have created a completely new python development workflow with fixed formatting, style, and unification of tooling around uv. We’ve also split our projects into smaller repos, some which function as libraries and some which are applications depending on those libraries.
I think the key to success here is to limit what context is required to do development. I’d say it’s slightly more on the extreme side of “modular” than a codebase I would write otherwise
Also, just because a model is open now doesn't mean it will always be. If/when China or meta catches up to the frontier, they'll instantly go closed source. China, the biggest surveillance state in the world, would love to have all user data pouring in to its servers. It's just a business strategy, they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
If you try the same with the highest cost models, it all ends in tears anyway.
A completely new app may seem to work ok but as soon as you're doing ongoing development, it needs to be broken down into smaller pieces of work. We're seeing this a lot at work, some people hope to skip the careful planning and review by using the top models, and it just leads to huge bills and a lot of rewriting.
What insane price is that? Pro is $20 per month. Same price as a Netflix ad free sub.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
It's not an expensive car vs. any car.
It's car vs. no car.
The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.
That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".
Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.
I agree it's incomplete what I wrote; you were right to call it out.
When you as an individual are getting tens of thousands of dollars of value from a $100 item and someone says there's a slightly-worse version for $1 but can't tell you if you'll find it slightly worse or noticeably worse.. you have to stop what you're doing to evaluate them, pay switching costs etc etc. so the cost difference is less than $99 and might actually be negative, and the difference in margin after paying switching costs is negligible.
So your rational response is to investigate to lower the stakes - but even performing the investigation eats into the time you're spending getting your tens of thousands of dollars of value.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
Below a certain threshold prices are effectively all the same.
Companies pay API prices because part of the bundle is a trust anchor / liability shield: "we bought Anthropic's thing! We didn't risk it! We paid for ZDR!"
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus. It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
Anthropic and its investors/customers don’t need random internet commenter’s permission to decide whether or not something is worth doing or justified.
Personally I think when something doesn’t make sense to you, you should try to figure out why it makes sense to other people, and whether they might have different needs/constraints/incentives/skills/knowledge.
Why might people spend more on AI as it gets better, rather than less? Could they, perhaps, allow for entirely new kinds of capabilities and products that hacker news commenters have not yet seen? As they have done every year for 3 straight years (hacker news has been wrong in exactly the same way every time, btw)? Might some people prefer to spend $10/day to work with the most capable AI available, due to the amount they use it while doing their job, and its effect on output? Do some people use AI for more than just tinkering with open source harnesses? Could it be that when you don’t understand something, there really is a way to explain it, that isn’t “everybody else must be stupid”?
I'm not the original poster but I find it very disturbing that you guys are SO touchy when confronted. Also, calling people who don't agree "idiots" is very distasteful. I would have banned you.
My thesis is very simple. LLMs are useful. LLMs at this point are too expensive. We're in a very frothy tech bubble where the inkling of labor being replaced caused their timelines to be pushed forwarded by at least 5 years.
Once the money runs out, subsidization will stop across the industry and we are headed for a VERY hard economic crash.
You guys are worse than crypto boosters. I've had to argue against those for at least 3 years, I think I'll have to argue against you for much longer.
And when LLMs actually reveal their true prices you'll all disappear into the woodwork and pop back out circa 2032-35 when hardware prices come back to normal and you'll claim "I was right all along".