[julianpye]

Why do people keep on saying that corporations will pay these price-tags? Most corporations really keep a very tight lid on their software license costs. A $250 license will be only provided for individuals with very high justification barriers and the resulting envy effects will be a horror for HR. I think it will be rather individuals who will be paying out of their pocket and boosting their internal results. And outside of those areas in California where apples cost $5 in the supermarket I don't see many individuals capable of paying these rates.

[Aurornis]

This isn't really out of line with many other SaaS licenses that companies pay for.

This also includes things like video and image generation, where certain departments might previously have been paying thousands of dollars for images or custom video. I can think of dozens of instances where a single Veo2/3 video clip would have been more than good enough to replace something we had to pay a lot of money and waste of a lot of time acquiring previously.

You might be comparing this to one-off developer tool purchases, which come out of different budgets. This is something that might come out of the Marketing Team's budget, where $250/month is peanuts relative to all of the services they were previously outsourcing.

I think people are also missing the $20/month plan right next to it. That's where most people will end up. The $250/month plan is only for people who are bumping into usage limits constantly or who need access to something very specific to do their job.

[verdverm]

We just signed up to spend $60+/month for every dev to have access to Copilot because the ROI is there. If $250/month save several hours per month for a person, it makes financial sense

[tacker2000]

How are you measuring this? How do you know it is paying off?

[Aurornis]

$60/month pays off if it saves even an hour of developer time over a month.

It's really not hard to save several hours of time over a month using AI tools. Even the Copilot autocomplete saves me several seconds here and there multiple times per hour.

[kikimora]

But doesn’t it also waste a few seconds of your time here and there when it fails to autocomplete and writes bad code you have to understand and fix?

[verdverm]

Typically you have to confirm additions and cancellation is just a press of ESC key. Ctrl+z is available too.

Even when the code is not 100% correct, it's often faster to select it and make the small.fix myself than to type all of it out myself. It's surprisingly good about keeping your patterns for naming and using recent edits as context for what you are likely to do next around your cursor position, even across files.

[afroboy]

And why AI hype train didn't work on gaming industry? why it didn't save hundreds of hours from game devs times to get latest GTA anytime sooner?

I'm not sure it's correct that we need to measure the benefits of AI depending on the lines of codes that we wrote but on how much we ship more quality features faster.

[delusional]

We signed up for that too. 2 quaters later the will to pay is significantly lower.

[julianpye]

Okay, but you're in a S/W team in a corp, where everyone's main task is to code. A coding agent has clear benefits here.

This is not the usecase of AI Ultra.

[troupo]

Corps will likely negotiate bulk pricing and discounts, with extra layers of guarantees like "don't use and share our data" on top

[MandieD]

When Docker pulled their subscription shenanigans, the global auto parts manufacturer I work for wasn't delighted when they saw $5 (or was it 7?)/month/user, but were ready to suck it up for a few hundred devs.

They noped right out when it turned out to be more like $20/month/user, not payable by purchase order, and instead spent a developer month cobbling together our own substitute involving Windows Subsystem for Linux, because it would pay off within two months.

[browningstreet]

The big problem for companies is that every SaaS vendor they use wants to upsell AI add-on licensing upgrades. Companies won’t buy the AI option for every app they’re licensing today. Something will have to give.

[ethbr1]

BYOLLM is the future.

Nobody outside of the major players (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce) has enough product suite eyeball time to justify a first-party subscription.

Most companies didn't target it in their first AI release because there was revenue laying on the ground. But the market will rapidly pressure them to support BYOLLM in their next major feature build.

They're still going to try to charge an add-on price on top of BYOLLM... but that margin is going to compress substantially.

Which means we're probably t minus 1 year from everyone outside the above mentioned players being courted and cut revenue-sharing deals in exchange for making one LLM provider their "preferred" solution with easier BYOLLM. (E.g. Microsoft pays SaaS Vendor X behind the scenes to drive BYOLLM traffic their way)

[bryanlarsen]

"AI will make us X% more productive. 100%-X% of you are fired, the rest get a $250/month license".

[throwaway2037]

I foresee a slightly different outcome: If companies can genuinely enhance worker productivity with LLMs (for many roles, this will be true), then they can expand their business without hiring more people. Instead of firing, they will slow the rate of hiring. Finally, the 250 USD/month license isn't that much of a cost burden if you start with the most senior people, then slowly extend the privilege to lower and lower levels, carefully deciding if the role will be positively impacted by access to a high quality LLM. (This is similar to how Wall Street trading floors decide who gets access to expensive market data via Reuters or Bloomberg terminal.)

For non-technical office jobs, LLMs will act like a good summer intern, and help to suppress new graduate hiring. Stuff like HR, legal, compliance, executive assistants, sales, marketing/PR, and accounting will all greatly benefit from LLMs. Programming will take much longer because it requires incredibly precise outputs.

One low hanging fruit for programming and LLMs: What if Microsoft creates a plug-in to the VBA editor in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) that can help to write VBA code? For more than 25 years, I have watched non-technical people use VBA, and I have generally been impressed with the results. Sure, their code looks like shit and everything has hard-coded limits, but it helps them do their work faster. It is a small miracle what people can teach themselves with (1) a few chapters of a introductory VBA book, (2) some blog posts / Google searches, and (3) macro recording. If you added (4) LLM, then it would greatly boost the productivity of Microsoft Office power users.

[kulahan]

I don’t see any benefit to removing humans in order to achieve the exact same level of efficiency… wouldn’t that just straight-up guarantee a worse product unless your employees were absolutely all horrendous to begin with?

[bryanlarsen]

It'll improve profit margins for a brief moment, long enough for the execs making the decision to cash out.

[ctkhn]

That's what most execs already believe, it's all just bean counting