alt Hacker NewsAs someone who can't stand these tools, I'm ecstatic. Y'all have been hooked by the early venture-backed "scale up at all cost" period. You're gonna get squeezed so hard once investors start demanding returns on their investments -- and this whole craze is, hopefully, coming to an end.
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That's what people widely claimed about Uber: it was toast once the investor subsidies stopped. Now it's quite profitable.
People will pay more. Claude Opus 4.5 is worth more than $20 per month, as is Gemini 3 Pro. These services keep getting better. Another three years of improvement, why shouldn't that command $30 or $40 instead?
$20 is ~$10 in the year 2000 per the BLS inflation calculator (or $1.25 when priced in gold). Nobody would have thought that was expensive for such utility. These are inexpensive tools at present.
You're likely going to stay seething for a while (even if bubble pops). the product market fit of these tools is so strong that companies paying tens of thousands per employee for them isn't really that big of a deal
Maybe don't hold your breath on that. Even if the price for AI tools would double, or tripple...that's still a very small part of the actual cost of an employee.