alt Hacker News> Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards
I doubt that. In my tiny town in India, office workers use the 1800 INR (20$) plans. 1800 INR/month is like... 4% of the salary these guys get. And since this is mostly MS-office and windows explorer and chrome based stuff in very small, non-tech companies, it pays for itself in literally a day. If they _could_ pay less they would. After all they pirate MS office. But the cheap chinese plans dont have any distribution, whereas OpenAI seems to have effectively marketed to them via IPL ads and such. No one there even knows about deepseek. It also doesn't help deepseek and such are focused on the coding market. No multimodal, office plugins, etc.
For personal stuff, people there use Meta AI - mostly because it is directly available in whatsapp and these days they are pushing it by adding a dedicated button for it right on the home page. Regardless, they still call it "chatgpt". OpenAI brand is unmatched.
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First I'd like to understand what are these "small" non-tech companies in tiny towns 45k to its employees? The last labor survey had average Indian salary pegged at 21k.
> it pays for itself in literally a day
Most comments in the thread say this but don't explain the how. How does it pay for itself "literally" in a day? Through productivity/time savings? How exactly?
I can only assume people are talking about productivity gains. Have their been reports of increased productivity or layoffs in tiny town, small non-tech companies in India that I am unaware of? What is the source here? Without a concrete source this is mostly anecdotal evidence and not backed by data.
Today there is novelty factor of AI. Questions or tasks which required people to really plan out now can be tested through AI quickly. To many people that seems like progress and that AI is paying itself. But most of it is busy work and isn't adding value to the companies. Given that everyone is on the AI hype train they might not be looking at the expenses closely. With time they will start poring it over and cancelling contracts en-masse.
I remember the piracy era, and it used to be a joke whether anyone could actually stop it.
Eventually MS dealt with piracy by going after firms, and finally by offering something cheap enough.
Between the legal aspects, and the fact that its MS office, paying Rs 1800 a month is possible.
I’ve been trawling every source I can find to understand what the story on the ground is, and when it comes to productivity it’s a huge mixed bag. The variance in outcomes between independent coders, frontier labs, someone in SV and someone in India is mind-bending right now.
Most firms which talk about their AI plans are not seeing traction, and the AI projects are going to the same place that the ML projects used to go to die.
It’s at the individual level that I am seeing productivity gains, however that isn’t something firms are happy to hear right now.
Remember that 20$ is a subsidized rate openai is currently willing to provide. Once that goes down you think these guys would be willing to pay token based billing charges ?