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0 pointsscotty794mo ago0 comments

> I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious

It wasn't when the service was first created. What's intentionally malicious is not fixing it for years.

Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens.

It's easy to guess why. Unlike hosting infra bs, inference is a hard cost for them. If they don't get paid, they lose (more) money. And sending stuff to collections is expensive and bad press.

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otterley4mo ago

> Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens.

That’s not a completely accurate characterization of what’s been happening. AI coding agent startups like Cursor and Windsurf started by attracting developers with free or deeply discounted tokens, then adjusted the pricing as they figure out how to be profitable. This happened with Kiro too[1] and is happening now with Google’s Antigravity. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on HN about this practice.

[1] disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own

gbear6054mo ago

I think you’re talking about a different thing? The bad practice from AWS et al is that you post-pay for your usage, so usage can be any amount. With all the AI things I’ve seen, either: - you prepay a fixed amount (“$200/mo for ChatGPT Max”) - you deposit money upfront into a wallet, if the wallet runs out of cash then you can’t generate any more tokens - it’s free!

I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.

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