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plucyesterday at 10:07 PM14 repliesview on HN

I'm really curious about something: how far will you go to support AI? Clearly they'll need to monetize things further, would you still use [whatever AI you are paying for] if the price was doubled? Tripled? Where would you stop and would you stop using AI altogether or would you look at competitors?


Replies

dofmyesterday at 10:37 PM

I will do nothing to “support” AI. Either it has utility or it doesn’t. I feel no loyalty or duty to help make it work if it doesn’t.

Anyway: Zero, as of right now.

I fully expect to be able to run useful LLMs on a machine I can justify buying for other reasons. I already can on the secondhand kit I own, and I don’t expect the cost-benefit analysis of local LLMs to ever really get worse.

If I ever need to pay for it, it will likely be to shift some of the capacity into the cloud for either business or pragmatic personal reasons (so I can just carry an iPad etc.)

I fully intend my expenditure to be negligible. Because once one realises that outspending others is impossible, only spending minimisation makes sense.

I foresee it potentially making sense for me to move some mature tools off a local LLM to openrouter, maybe. But probably to the same or similar models.

dgellowyesterday at 10:55 PM

I don’t and won’t support AI. For a while I paid 200€ a month and would have been happy to pay up to maybe 600€. However I don’t want to participate anymore in using such an anti-human technology and industry

protocoltureyesterday at 11:08 PM

I pay for good tools that I use.

I spend 30 - 60 bucks a year with Horizon Labs.

I spend 25 bucks a month on Cursor. Cursor replaced an OpenAI sub.

Both support hobby projects. If either cost increased I would spend some time testing local alternatives and probably drop them.

Horizon Labs especially, I know that they have been matched by open models and are mostly a convenience at this point.

c7byesterday at 11:18 PM

I make an important distinction between cloud services and local AI. My lifetime spending on cloud AI is probably less than $500, and I don't intend to spend any more. But I've already dropped $2.5k on new hardware for local inference, and could easily see myself spending more in the future. In fact, I'm regularly browsing for deals. I would also be open to paying for local models, if there was a way to make that compatible with fully open models.

AI is so important, I want to have it under my control. Even if I have to pay a penalty in terms of capabilities.

cjyesterday at 10:14 PM

I’d easily pay multiple hundreds. Possibly a thousand a month.

If I were really forced to.

LLMs provide me about the same value as a car does.

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nancyminusoneyesterday at 10:20 PM

I've spent a grand total of $25 on AI ever, so apparently my answer is $25. But I'm not a big time software dev like the rest of you.

When I bought my last GPU, running AI models locally was a consideration though not the only one, and I have it set up but haven't used it much yet. I mostly use the free tiers of ChatGPT or Google to write the occasional script for me. I guess they're going to have to inject a truly unfathomable number of ads to get their money's worth.

I have a feeling my experience is closer to an average persons' than a dev, but it doesn't seem like they'll be able to monetize just from devs even if each one is spending thousands a month.

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timaclesyesterday at 11:52 PM

I don’t think there’s a single person out there that will ‘support’ AI

Maybe it’s just your phrasing but people will only pay for what works, no one is loony enough to support a trillion dollar industry out of the kindness of their heart or spirit of innovation

mewpmewp2yesterday at 11:25 PM

It depends on how much time it saves me and how much I make per hour generally, right?

If AI allows me to cut my time to do something in half on average or allows me to do 2x more it would be worth it to pay up to what my monthly income was before assuming my income scaled with my output.

flux3125yesterday at 10:30 PM

Max 60 bucks a month. More than that and I'd just move to local qwen 35b or some other cheaper model on openrouter.

vb-8448yesterday at 10:23 PM

For personal use not more than 30$/month.

For work, it depends, but if I have to spend more than a few hundreds bucks probably I'll start looking for alternatives (local models, Chinese providers, ecc)

PS: I'm in Italy, I guess in several parts of the world these figures are even smaller.

carlosjobimtoday at 1:22 AM

Businesses know exactly how much they make or save thanks to AI. Take your hourly wage and count how many hours you save, and you know what it's worth to you. People who use AI for real world tasks would probably mostly accept double or even triple.

bigstrat2003yesterday at 10:34 PM

Zero. It provides no value to me.

binaryturtleyesterday at 10:39 PM

Never paid a cent, never will pay a cent. I have my principles.

It may put me at a disadvantage when it comes to quickly slop something together? But so far the free-to-use chat bots do as well for my needs.

sorry_outta_gasyesterday at 10:19 PM

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