[chalkycrimp]

Startup owner using AI with this need - needless to say, a real problem. I've considered DIYing an internal service for this - even if we went with you we'd probably have an intern do a quick and dirty copy, which I rarely advocate for if I can offload to SAAS. I'm sure you've put a fair bit of work into this that goes well beyond the human interaction loop, but that's really all we need. Your entry price is steep (I'm afraid to ask what an enterprise use-case looks like) and this isn't complicated to make. We don't need to productize or have all the bells and whistles - just human interaction occasionally. Any amount of competition would wipe out your pricing, so no I would not want to pay for this.

[dhorthy]

thanks for the validation of the problem! totally open to feedback about the solution, and totally get that you only need something simple for now. I want to point out that we do have a pay-as-you-go tier which is $20 for 200 operations, and have a handful of indie devs finding this useful for back-office style automations.

ALSO - something I think about a lot - if a all/most of the HumanLayer SaaS backend was open source, would that change your thinking?

[chalkycrimp]

My gut feeling is with where we're headed we'll clear that 200 pretty quickly in production cases, so we'd be interested in bit higher volume. Our dev efforts would probably clear that 200/mo. If the flow/backend was open-source that'd be a total game changer for us as I see it as an integral part of our product.

edit: I want to add here that while ycomb companies like yourself may have VC backing, a lot of us don't and do consider 500+/mo. base price on a service that is operations-limited to be a lot. You need to decide who your target audience is, I may not be in that audience for your SAAS pricing. This seems like a service that a lot of people need, but it also stands out to me as a service that will be copied at an extravagantly lower price. We have truly entered software as a commodity when I, a non-AI engineer, can whip up something like this in a week using serverless infra and $0.0001/1k tokens with gpt-o mini.

[dhorthy]

that makes sense - and have wondered a lot even more generally about the price of software and what makes a hard problem hard. Like Amjad from Replit said on a podcast recently "can anyone build 'the next salesforce' in a world where anyone can build their own salesforce with coding agents and serverless infra"

I think in building this some of the things that folks decided they don't want to deal with is like, the state machine for escalations/routing/timeouts, and infrastructure to catch inbound emails and turn them into webhooks, or stitch a single agent's context window with multiple open slack threads, but you're right, that can all be solved by a software engineer with enough time and interest in solving the problem.

I will need to clear up the pricing page as it sounds like I didn't do a good job (great feedback thank you!) - it's basically $20/200 credits, and you can pay-as-you-go, and re-up for more whenever you want. We are early and delivering value is more important to me than extracting every dollar, especially out of a fellow founder who's early. If you geniunely find this useful, I would definitely chat and collaborate/partner to figure out something you think is fair, where you're getting value and you get to focus on your core competency. feel free to email me dexter at humanlayer dot dev

[conductr]

I’m just armchair quarterbacking here but I feel like you should just do all features for every user with a single $/action rate, then give discounts for volume and/or prepayment. Even saying $20/200 is a clunky statement. You could just say $0.10 per action (the fact that you’re actually requiring me to make a $20 payment with a $20 charge once it gets to $10 or something like that isn’t even important to me on a pricing page, although when you mention it later in the billing page make sure you also tell people it’s a risk-free money back guarantee if that’s the case)

If there’s something that truly has an incremental cost to you, like providing priority support, that goes into the “enterprise pricing” section and you need to figure out how to quote that separately from the service. My guess is most people don’t want to pay extra for that, or perhaps they’d pay for some upfront integration support but ongoing support is not too important to them. Idk, that’s just my guess here.

[dhorthy]

thanks - definitely worth saying - I've thought a bit about the 10c/operation rather than 200/$20 - might give that a shot or A/B test a little

[j45]

Big systems like Salesforce started as small things that more deeply learned about and more deeply understood unmet demand and customer needs, and then got to packaging it in a way to create something that grows.

Coding agents can help more with tasks and not quite big entire massive platforms on their own. Humans may be able to scale much further and bigger with their skills.

[dhorthy]

i like that angle...I also hear a lot that 'coding agents are great for prototypes, but we usually need a team to bring it to production'

[j45]

First congrats on the launch - I like it.

My feedback: what’s there looks inviting. Email interaction is handy, other ways would be too.

If there was a low code way to arrange the humanlayer primitives for folks at the edge of using it, I think human tasks could meet something like this even broader. Happy to chat offline.

Onto your comment: The coding for coding agents is still kinda prototype. It feels like some folks quietly have setup a very productive workflow themselves for quite sometime.

Still, there no doubt you could ship production code in some cases - except ai needs to handle all the things development explicitly and implicitly checks before doing so.

Getting to build some things that became more than few orders of magnitude larger than planned, one can learn a lot from the deep experiences of others… and I’m not sure where that is in AI. Speaking to someone with experience and insight can provide some profound insight, clarification and simplification.

Still, an axiom for me remains: clever architecture still tends to beat clever coding.

The best code often is the code that’s not written and not maintained and hopefully the functionality can be achieved through interacting with the architecture.

This approach is only one way, but it can take both domain knowledge and data knowledge, to put in enough a domain and data driven design relative to how well the developer may know the required and anticipated needs.

The high end of software development is many leagues beyond even what I just described. There’s a lot of talk about 10x engineers, I’d say there can be developers who definitely can be 10x as effective or reach 10x more of the solution, than average.

If a lot of the code AI is modelled on is based on the body of code in repos, most on a wide scale may be average to above average at most, perfectly serviceable and iteratively updated.

Sometimes we see those super elegant designs of fewer tables and code that does near everything, because it’s developments 5th or 6th version creating major overhauls. It could be refactored, or if the schema is not brittle, maybe a rewrite in full or part of the exact same team is present to do it.

Today’s AI could help shed a light in some of those directions, relative to the human using it. This again says in the hands of an expert developer AI can do a ton more for them, but the line to automation might be something else.

There is agentic ai and human in the loop to still figure itself out, as well as how to improve the existing processes. 2025 looks to be interesting.

[1123581321]

If your use would be 500/mo, you’d just pay them $40 or $60 per month.

[davedx]

Honestly: don't spend your time on HN comments like this. Focus on customers who want to pay you for it.

[endofreach]

I have built a dumb internal service for this that i have been using for more than a year now. And just today i've thought about turning it into a simple product, as i am in need to finance the work on my actual product. Then i saw this Show HN & then your comment. Which makes me wonder: how would you use such a service "occasionally"? And what would be your pricing expectation?

[j45]

This might deserve to be the new to-do list everyone learns to build if only that there's so much to learn from trying on how to get it best.. this month or quarter.

[fireflies33]

Hey, would you be open to checking out something I hacked together on GitHub? https://github.com/adrian-kong/hitl-middleware

I wasn’t sure if this would be relevant to you or useful at all, but it’s a quick solution I built for HITL workflows. Happy to hear your thoughts or if you think it’s applicable!

[hv23]

What's an example of the use cases you're seeing with agents in your day-to-day?

[davedx]

Classic HN comment, almost a carbon copy of the Dropbox one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224