Technology

That many free accounts is against their user agreement though hehe

I've been preaching this for the past couple of years. Everything up until now has been entirely about gaining market share, and AI will never be cheaper than it is right now, and it's not cheap.

Just look at the "earnings" for companies like openAI. They are 1000+% in the red. It's impossible for them to change their sales model enough to make that profitable. As more data centers go up, the operating costs are also going to go up.

I've been telling people that now is the best time in the past decade or more to learn how to code. There will be positions available in the coming years when the only junior devs available are vibe coders.

It's not even just private equity, this is more or less the exact strategy Microsoft uses.

The crazy thing is, this isn't really a "squeeze" in the traditional sense. The problem was that every single mainstream AI product has been heavily subsidized....because it's wildly expensive and not even close to being profitable.

That sort of subsidization was only going to last for so long. The dam is starting to crack. People aren't ready to pay what AI truly costs.

This is going much faster than most private equity enshittification. That usually takes about 5 years to start. And has a system or hardware that makes switching painful. That doesn't apply here, it's easy to switch and almost a drop in change.

Pretty sure they picked the wrong tech to try and lock people into. It isn't hardware and doesn't have some kind of proprietary interface that takes time to get used to when switching. Some models might be better than others at specific things, but not enough to justify the prices they are going to charge for output you have to review and fix.

This is literally the easiest thing to jump ship from.

The unique thing about GitHub Copilot (and all the other vibe-coding tools) is that they're speed-running the playbook because this shit is not profitable. It can't be. Their costs scale up with usage, unlike every other business that can take advantage of economies of scale, so they've skipped the slow, steady enshittification phase and jumped directly into the "squeeze blood from this stone to keep the scam going a little longer" phase.

The strategy is always to gain a monopoly or near monopoly on a market before pushing for the enshittification of the product to reduce costs and maximize profits, once customers have become dependent on said product, then pray that most choose the path of least resistance which is staying and dealing with the worse and more expensive version of what they're used to rather than retraining or restarting from zero elsewhere.

Capitalism 101.

I didn't see it coming as I am on Codeberg 😎

I remember having to sit down my boss and explain how it can only become more expensive over time. It’s the big tech playbook after all. Didn‘t matter. I‘m told again and again how AI is only becoming stronger and cheaper. Especially during salary negotiations. Nasty stuff. They know I know it‘s BS and they still cling to this nonsensical narrative because it would be very beneficial to them and very bad for me.

The tactic has worked for drug dealers for decades

Users are paying way more than the cost of inference. Look up inference prices of high end open weight models vs claude or gpt. Cheaper by an order of magnitude.

It's the constant training of new models that's losing them money. New version is out every month.

Anyone planning to make a profit by billing this as metered is dreaming when agents suck down 40k tokens in a single prompt. I did the math, at like 0.2 cents a token that would still be 8k. No one is paying 8k for a single prompt. At 0.015, thats still 600 dollars. Its never going to make sense.

At my company, all of us devs have GitHub copilot enterprise licenses, which was $39/month for basically unlimited use on most models. The new pricing is the same price except we get 3900 copilot credits a month. 1 credit is 1000 tokens. There is nothing concrete about how many tokens are used, but they estimate powerful models like Claude will use about 10 credits per transaction. The more basic models are less consumption, but still count. Code completion is still unlimited. It's going to get really expensive really fast for companies balls deep in it.

For token context, we had someone come in and give us an hour long vibe coding lesson with Claude code.he created a basic 600 line app in that hour and consumed 40000 tokens. I have UI tests with twice as many lines of code. It's going to be a blood bath, and I'm here for it.