Maybe in the US? I will never pay 100$ for a subscription and I despise that people normalized it by even buying this stuff instead of saying "no, that's way too expensive".
Well bucko it’s time to open your wallet. There’s creatives out there who spend at least $1000/month in subscriptions for tools, but without those tools they could never do most of the work they do. And some who buy physical gear like photographs and videographers pay even way more than that for equipment.
Soon it will be the same for developers. Developers really are a spoiled bunch when it comes to paying for things, many will balk at paying $99/year just to publish stuff on an App Store. Everyone just wants free open source stuff. As expectations on developer productivity rises, you will be paying for these AI tools no matter how expensive they get, or you will just be gentrified out of the industry. The choice is yours.
I work in a cleanroom to fabricate semiconductor devices and I spend hundreds of euros per hour to use specific tools which mostly just use electricity and maintenance. Should we complain that it’s too expensive or should we use them because they’re worth the price?
Things have a price for a reason. It’s up to you whether it’s worth paying that or not.
We are talking about personal use and then people don't pay for it out of their own pocket but the company's. At least I hope so because otherwise it would be very dumb.
I’m also talking about personal use. These are research devices for my PhD. I’m obviously not paying out of pocket, but my funding agency does.
I’m trying to convey that if a tool increases your efficiency by more than it costs then it’s worth paying for it regardless of how expensive it is. It’s how the economy works.
There is no free lunch. Even if a company pays for it instead of you, their LLM costs per developer will be factored in to what they are willing to provide as compensation. So one way or another, the end result is you get paid for less for the same amount of work today.
That “if” doesn’t apply to all of us, though. Not everybody is paid by the hour. I’d love to try something like Claude code, but $100 per month is way too expensive for me, and it probably wouldn’t even give me a single extra dollar of income. I think I’ll just wait for the time when local LLMs will be good enough to be a viable alternative.
By the time you can run good enough local LLMs without splurging on sufficiently powerful hardware, those LLMs will look like toys compared to whatever cloud based LLMs are available.
Soon it will be the same for developers. Developers really are a spoiled bunch when it comes to paying for things, many will balk at paying $99/year just to publish stuff on an App Store. Everyone just wants free open source stuff. As expectations on developer productivity rises, you will be paying for these AI tools no matter how expensive they get, or you will just be gentrified out of the industry. The choice is yours.