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by QGQBGdeZREunxLe 24 days ago
How are you billing clients when using AI? Do you pass on costs or do you multiply time saved by your hourly rate and bill that?
2 comments

I eat the cost right now.

The fee schedule is simple: Every work item is assigned a difficulty level by the business + in-house dev team. That is multiplied by a base fee and that establishes the bounty for the item. I get paid this amount the moment the work item flows into production and is approved by customer.

There are no limits. If they were to hand me 120 days worth of work and I finish it in one week, I would get paid exactly the same. I don't have to be clandestine about this either. The contract clearly describes this arrangement, so there are some cases where it's like "wow I can't believe we're gonna pay $10000 for that amount of labor", but we all know that isn't the point. They know they got exactly what they bargained for. It's just ahead of schedule, which provides even more intrinsic value to the business.

In this arrangement, if I were to bill the client for my token usage, a small conflict in interest could arise. It's not a big deal, but most things start out that way.

Sounds like he pays for AI himself. He said he bills by the feature/bug. So he keeps all the productivity gains from using AI