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npuntyesterday at 10:24 PM1 replyview on HN

No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.

The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.

The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.


Replies

vehemenzyesterday at 11:09 PM

The dabbler/serious user distinction isn't the only framing here.

Assuming this limitation applies to team seats in the same way, at $20/mo, businesses could afford to have everybody on the plan. Plenty of folks write only a few hours of code per day—or even per week in their job. These are still professionals, not dabblers.