Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Someone1234 92 days ago
Yep.

Or if you're a business with multiple seats, these plans may be more inefficient than raw API usage billing. Since if anyone at your organization fails to utilize their full $19/39 allotment each month, that's wasting money, whereas with API credits it is 100% utilized.

I don't think they've thought through the implications of this. Everyone should cancel and go usage-based billing with caps.
2 comments
to11mtm 92 days ago
They do address this in the doc, Orgs can now (although it was vague as to whether it was an option or just the new standard, probably option due to business contracts) 'pool' the Usage billing across all users.

I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.

link
Someone1234 92 days ago
You're right, I missed that.

It still does make one wonder, why have seats at all though? If everyone is just in one big API credit pool - what do the seats/users accomplish?

link
easton 92 days ago
It forces you to pay at least $20 in tokens per user even for people who use less (they probably have stats on how many people use just autocomplete, which doesn’t count against the quota. or have a seat and don’t use the service at all).
link
to11mtm 92 days ago
You can get at least at baseline vague stats but from what I have seen it is more account than user focused, i.e. 'X number of users used %feature%' and/or '%model% was X percent of requests per day'.

That said it's worth noting, I don't see how anything they expose will reliably help orgs plan costing from what AFAIK is in fact a big shift for billing/costing planning.

> It forces you to pay at least $20

For better or worse that's public pricing, i.e. if you are coming in also negotiating VS for devs, windows/office licenses for the rest of the business and stuff like Azure Devops... a lot of their stuff gets cheaper if your company's IT procurement group is vaguely competent at negotiating. Not even talking bigcorp here I'm talking 500-1000 employee range.

Of course, very small orgs will suffer, but it does tie in with the theme over the last two weeks; anyone with a personal account is basically subsidizing the credits for the business accounts during the transition period.

link
Mattwmaster58 92 days ago
For orgs, each user was allotted their own quota. For messages beyond that quota, a pooled budget is available.
link
DominikPeters 92 days ago
They mention in the announcement that it will be possible to pool usage across an organization.
link