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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

… For now, until the machine you keep feeding eats your business.

Anyway, if it’s worth more than $200/month definitely don’t spend $600 and expect it’ll replace that. But $2400 ($200/month for one year) gets you much closer to sota than $600 - and whatever the line that stops being a rounding error for your business gets you closer still.

How much is it worth to own your livelihood? To me outsourcing to anthropic or openai for $200/month means you’re handing them the ability to kill your business at any moment without even noticing. That’s worth more to me than 30% points of intelligence.

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I’m getting like $8k per month in API rate value from each $200/month subscription.

You clearly have an ideological issue with these companies, but I don’t share your views or your values. They could cut me off tomorrow but it wouldn’t kill my business. Worst case, I’d have to figure out how to make do with what you’re already choosing to do today.

I absolutely do have an ideological viewpoint. I hope i haven’t come across as trying to hide that.

One of my beliefs, call it ideology if you like, is that api cost is much more representative of real cost of this stuff. Good luck switch to local models the same week everyone else decides to switch because subscription prices went up 5x… it’s going to cost more than $600.

Anyway, like it or not, you are giving $200/month to fund another ideology. One that looks to me like a leopards-eating-faces type of ideology.

There's nothing wrong with having an ideology or having a set of values that the big AI labs are bad for the world and you don't want to support them, etc.

But in this case it seems like it's led your reasoning astray into this perspective where a small open weight model you can run on cheap hardware is just as good as the value you get from paying $200 to Anthropic. The reality is that it's not even close, at least for some people's use cases.

I really doubt I'll ever need to use local models, even in a scenario where the big labs stop doing subscriptions (unlikely), I could just pay API rates for the open weight models through OpenRouter, or just pay for API rates for Sonnet 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol, and adjust my workflows a bit. Still worth it.

I don't know, there are a LOT of things I worry about with AI, but what I'm going to do when the big labs drop subscriptions isn't even in my top 10. Probably not my top 20. Just a non-factor.

> on cheap hardware is just as good as the value you get from paying $200 to Anthropic

Not just as good. I’ve never said just as good. what i will stand by is good enough. What you can get for $600 is good enough to be useful for building software. Since paying anthropic/openai money to continue their sociopathic mission is a hard no-go for me, i’m just very glad there’s another option that passes “good enough* bar.

>They could cut me off tomorrow but it wouldn’t kill my business. Worst case, I’d have to figure out how to make do with what you’re already choosing to do today.

That's just the issue of your access to AI in the worst case.

The actually impactful part of the worst case would be what happens to your ability to have a job, put food on the table, or even afford to live in a house.

I have only so much control over any of that.

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