[simianwords]

I pasted everything you wrote and ChatGPT said

>The "$25k per month" figure is almost certainly the result of ChatGPT making assumptions, not a fact derived from any known business model.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a28193b-6ec0-8333-a1af-d07e8d89ef...

Your whole calculation is also ridiculous - I think you assumed what revenue per month is required to pay off hardware within a year? Why would I use hardware within a year?

I would suggest consulting with ChatGPT and coming up with a better and more coherent argument.

[emil-lp]

I reran the numbers, break even after four years. 10k users.

Minimum upfront: about $15M

Comfortable upfront: $20M–$25M

Monthly revenue needed: $900k–$1.5M

Required price per 10k individual customers: $99–$149/month

API-equivalent output price: usually $8–$20/M output tokens, unless utilization is very high.

[simianwords]

dawg -- what is your point? please write your statement clearly and we can discuss.

[emil-lp]

My apologies for not being clear about my point.

I try to do some napkin math of what it takes to start a company serving an LLM to customers. I thought maybe 10,000 users sounded like a reasonable number.

I'd like also to compare it to traditional Internet companies, e.g. Twitter. I'd guess Twitter with 10k users would cost me literally a dumpster dive, so essentially no cost.

If I were to start an LLM company, what would my initial investment look like?

Turns out around 15+ million dollars assuming I would get 10,000 users willing to pay 200$/month.

I just don't see how the numbers you show add up.