Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Sounds pretty interesting, I was thinking that would be the way to work past limited context window sizes automatically.

> Codebuff has limited free usage, but if you like it you can pay $99/mo to get more credits...

> One user racked up a $500 bill...

Those two statements are kind of confusing together. Past the free tier, what does $99/month get you? It sounds like there's some sort of credit, but that's not discussed at all here. How much did this customer do to get to that kind of bill? I get that they built a flutter app, but did it take a hour to run up a $500 bill? 6 hours? a whole weekend? Is there a way to set a limit?

The ability to rack up an unreasonable bill by accident, even just conceptually, is a non-starter for many. This is interactive so it's not as bad as accidentally leaving a GPU EC2 instance on overnight, but I'll note that Aider shows per query and session costs.

Ah, good catch. We (read: I) introduced a bug that gave customers $500 worth of credits in a month as opposed to the $100 they paid for, and this user saw that and took advantage. Needless to say, we fixed the issue and added more copy to show to users when they _do_ exceed their thresholds. We haven't had that issue since. And of course, we ate the cost because it was our (expensive!) mistake.

The user had spent the entire weekend developing the app, and admitted that he would have been more careful to manage his Codebuff usage had it not been for this bug.

We're open to adding hard limits to accounts, so you're never charged beyond the credits you paid for. We just wanted to make sure people could pay a bit more to get to a good stopping point once they passed their limits.

Oh I see. it's an interesting story and thanks for the transparency. Might leave that out of the pitch as it's confusing and the thought of running up a $500 bill is scary and since the user ultimately didn't pay for it, seems like noise.

Have you considered a bring your own api key model?

> The user had spent the entire weekend developing the app, and admitted that he would have been more careful to manage his Codebuff usage had it not been for this bug.

On the flip side, there's probably useful things to learn from how he developed his app when he didn't feel the need to be careful; in a way, your $500 mistake bought you useful test data.

In my own use of Aider, I noticed I'm always worried about the costs and pay close attention to token/cost summaries it displays. Being always on my mind, this affects my use of this tool in ways I'm only beginning to uncover. Same would likely be true for Codebuff users.

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