Reading up on pricing
100 deep · digging since nov 19, 25
- Tracking Costco gas prices
This project tracks Costco gas prices across locations, finding that average savings vs. nearby stations are usually $0.10-$0.30 per gallon but vary significantly by region.
- OpenRouter is joining Stripe
OpenRouter revealed that it is joining forces with Stripe to embed its AI model routing technology within Stripe's payment platform, allowing developers to monetize AI usage directly.
- The Gulf Oil Shock Is Pushing E.V. Sales to New Heights. See Where.
The recent spike in global fuel prices is propelling electric vehicle sales to unprecedented levels, with data visualizations showing adoption rising sharply across multiple regions.
- How to Feed a Family for $28 a Day - NYT Cooking
The author shows that a family of three can eat home‑cooked meals for about $28 a day by planning meals, sticking to a list, repurposing leftovers, and choosing budget‑friendly ingredients.
- Even Claude Is in the Dark About Dario Amodei’s Wife—and Her Influence at Anthropic - WSJ
Cami Clark, wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and former founder of a controversial adult startup, serves as a quiet strategic adviser and early connector to key investors like Eric Schmidt, despite her low public profile.
- Input based pricing vs Output based pricing
The article contrasts input-based pricing (charging for resource usage like API calls) with output-based pricing (charging for resolved outcomes), explaining their trade-offs in customer perception, measurement complexity, and product incentives.
- OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
OverpAId is a marketplace that lets companies hire fractional CEOs at a fraction of traditional costs by replacing full-time executives with on-demand AI-augmented leadership.
- Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?
HN users share frustration over brands discontinuing beloved everyday products, seeking solidarity and solutions for preserving access to reliable items they depend on.
- StatsKit
StatsKit helps early‑stage startups diagnose why visitors don’t convert and lets them A/B test copy, pricing, and paywalls, measuring impact on actual revenue.
- lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
Lobsters successfully moved from MariaDB to SQLite, cutting CPU and memory use, halving VPS costs, and keeping the site responsive after migration.
- Model Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t.
IBM Research argues effective model routing is a systems optimization problem balancing cost, latency, and accuracy, not a simple classification task.
- Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5 as a more agentic, cheaper model, but Hacker News commenters argue it often underperforms Opus 4.8 in real-world tasks and appears optimized for token consumption.
- Should I Buy an Area Rug on Etsy?
A buyer receives guidance on evaluating rug quality, pricing, and return policies before purchasing from Etsy vendors.
- No Doilies Here: In the Age of Airbnb, Bed-and-Breakfasts Are Coming Into Their Own
Bed-and-breakfast inns compete with vacation rentals like Airbnb by emphasizing unique décor, personalized service, and flexible policies.
- Opinion | It’s Ugly. It Costs $640,000. Everyone Is Mad About It but Me.
Ferrari's new £640,000 EV wins the author's praise despite widespread critical backlash for its design and price.
- Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Slate's $24,950 EV truck offers a single factory color with DIY wrap kits in multiple colors for $500, aiming to provide affordable customization.
- Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
Chinese resellers sell cheap Claude tokens via pooled accounts and fraud, harvesting user data for distillation into Chinese AI models as Anthropic alleges Alibaba illicitly extracts capabilities.
- How Meter Pricing Is Testing the Economics of AI
Tech firms are introducing usage-based pricing for AI services, challenging flat subscription fees and testing new economic dynamics for the industry.
- Is SpaceX Worth $1.77 Trillion? It’s a Pie in the Sky, Some Investors Say
Investors question SpaceX's $1.77 trillion valuation as the company loses money and faces skepticism about its revenue projections.
- Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 \ Anthropic
Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5, a safety-nerfed Mythos-class model for general use, and Mythos 5 for vetted cyber defenders, both at half the price of Mythos Preview.
- Anthropic Releases ‘Safe’ Version of Its Mythos A.I. Technology
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a purportedly safer flagship AI model priced at double the cost of its predecessor.
- Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them – R&A IT Strategy & Architecture
Coding with LLMs like Claude Code may cost providers $1000+ for every $100 in subscription revenue, making true agentic coding economically unsustainable.
- Can I Trust the ‘Zestimate’ for My Home on Zillow?
Zillow's Zestimate accuracy depends on the quality of data fed into its system, says a real estate attorney.
- The Wall Street Mania Pushing Knicks Tickets to $176,000 - WSJ
A Knicks fan navigates an inflated ticket resale market driven by Wall Street wealth and a half-century title drought.
- Knicks Fans Want ’90s Tees. They’ll Have to Pay Very 2026 Prices.
A vintage Knicks fan clothing line is launching with retro '90s designs but at premium prices reflecting 2026 production and licensing costs.
- Lights, Camera … I Do
Movie theaters are becoming an unexpected and inexpensive wedding venue, offering built-in seating, stage, and some entertainment.
- I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Anthropic and OpenAI may have reached product-market fit based on enterprise willingness to pay $200/month for tokens, though valuation and cost sustainability remain contested.
- AI Is Changing How Consultants Get Paid—and Much More, BCG’s CEO Says - WSJ
BCG's CEO says AI is boosting revenue and head count, not killing consulting, and is shifting pay toward value-based models tied to client outcomes.
- What Plunging Pork Prices Say About China’s Economy
Plunging pork prices in China hit a 16-year low, driven by weak consumer spending and an oversupply of hogs, highlighting economic challenges.
- I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit with coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, driving enterprise spending so high that both companies switched to API-based billing and are approaching profitability.
- GitHub - anomalyco/models.dev: An open-source database of AI models.
Models.dev is an open-source, community-contributed database of AI model specifications, pricing, and capabilities, accessible via API and TOML data files.
- 61% of Americans Said They Had to Cut Back on Groceries
A survey finds 61% of Americans cut back on groceries, and over 75% (including 55% of Republicans) blame Trump's policies for rising costs.
- Cheap AI could derail OpenAI and Anthropic's IPOs
The article argues that cheap AI from Chinese labs and Western alternatives is eroding the pricing power and market share underpinning OpenAI and Anthropic's high IPO valuations.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: more expensive, but Google plan to use it for everything
Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash at a 3x-6x price increase, yet deploys it across Search and Gemini app, testing price tolerance.
- Why ‘Smart’ Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice
A growing consumer backlash against Wi-Fi-connected, app-based 'smart' products in the name of simplicity is driving preference for non-connected 'dumb' alternatives.
- Amazon launches 30-minute delivery across the US
Amazon launches Amazon Now, a 30-minute delivery service for thousands of items across dozens of U.S. cities, undercutting competitors on price for Prime members.
- Pricing | SecondLight
SecondLight offers three AI virtual staging plans: Starter at $199/year, Pro at $469-499/year, and custom Enterprise pricing.
- DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier
DeepSeek V4 Pro offers coding quality near frontier models like Opus 4.7 at a fraction of the cost, though some users note slower thinking and data privacy concerns.
- Markets in everything?
Matt Glassman argues that the relentless expansion of market logic into personal life—from betting on statements to speculative pricing—creates resentment by forcing people to price sentimentality and opt into unwanted transactions.
- The April every AI plan broke - by Anton Zagrebelny
Flat-rate AI subscriptions broke in April 2026 as agentic workloads caused unsustainable unit economics, forcing providers to shift to per-token billing.
- Grok 4.3 | xAI Docs
xAI's Grok 4.3 API model offers text and image input, a 1M token context window, and function calling at $1.25/M input tokens.
- These Countries Embrace E.V.s to Avoid Oil Price Shocks
Costa Rica and other nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are increasingly adopting electric vehicles to reduce vulnerability to fluctuating oil prices.
- Coding plan comparisons based on actual usage — sites.diy
Codex offers the best value among coding subscriptions at $0.08/M tokens, while Claude Pro costs $0.744/M tokens, making it ~10x more expensive per token than most rivals.
- Books are not too expensive
Books are not too expensive when accounting for inflation and publisher margins, with commenters debating price variance, DRM, textbook monopolies, and the declining value of physical formats versus free online resources.
- I am building a cloud
exe.dev, co-founded by a Tailscale founder, offers SSH-accessible VMs for $20/month, aiming to simplify cloud infrastructure for AI agents.
- How a Half-Empty NYC Tower Became the Hottest Office on the Market - WSJ
The Nine West building in NYC, once half-empty after the 2008 crisis, now commands record rents and is the hottest office market property.
- The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market - The New York Times
Used La Marzocco espresso machines now sell for more than new ones because café owners and collectors bid up the limited supply.
- Apple’s Mac Mini Went Viral. Why Can’t You Buy One Right Now? - WSJ
Apple's Mac Mini faces severe shortages and shipping delays of up to 12 weeks due to unexpected demand from AI power users running local large language models.
- MacBook Neo sells out for April as demand for Apple's $599 laptop outpaces supply - 9to5Mac
Apple's $599 MacBook Neo sold out for April, with delivery dates pushing to May due to sustained demand since its March 11 launch.
- The Beginning of Scarcity in AI
GPU rental prices surged 48% in 60 days, signaling an AI compute shortage that will reshape startup competition and access to frontier models.
- AI Is Using So Much Energy That Computing Firepower Is Running Out - WSJ
The AI computing capacity crunch is causing companies like Anthropic to ration usage and raise prices, threatening the AI boom's rapid adoption.
- Can Flights Get Any Worse? Travelers Deal With TSA Lines, High Ticket Prices and Anxiety. - The New York Times
Travelers face record TSA wait times, high ticket prices, and increased anxiety after a deadly crash at LaGuardia Airport.
- As Gas Prices Spike, California Is Hit Hardest - The New York Times
California's average gas price has risen to nearly $6 per gallon, roughly $2 above the national average due to state-specific factors.
- Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website
Walmart's test of 200,000 products via ChatGPT's Instant Checkout found conversion rates three times lower than directing users to its website, leading it to drop the feature for its own integrated shopping experience.
- There are only two paths left for software
Software companies must either accelerate revenue growth by 10 points with new AI products or rebuild for 40%+ true operating margins, with no viable middle path.
- We Tested MiniMax M2.7 Against Claude Opus 4.6 - by Darko
MiniMax M2.7 scored 56.22% on SWE-Pro, matching Claude Opus 4.6 on bug and vulnerability detection at roughly 7% of the cost in practical coding tests.
- This Corvette’s a Hybrid, but It’s Built for Raw Power, Not Efficiency - The New York Times
The 2025 Corvette ZR1X is a hybrid showpiece starting at $207,000, offering raw power that rivals Ferrari and McLaren at a lower price.
- What to Know About Electric Cars When Gas Prices Are Surging - The New York Times
High gas prices caused by war in Iran are driving car shoppers to consider electric vehicles as a way to escape volatile fuel costs.
- Introducing Composer 2
Cursor released Composer 2, a frontier-level coding model achieving strong benchmarks (CursorBench 61.3, Terminal-Bench 61.7) at competitive pricing.
- You’ve Finally Figured Out AI at Work—Now Comes the Bill - WSJ
Companies like Zapier are tracking workers' AI token consumption as a cost metric, using it to evaluate efficiency and productivity.
- 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
Claude's Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now provide a 1M token context window at standard pricing with no long-context premium, and support up to 600 images or PDF pages per request.
- “This is not the computer for you”
A Hacker News commenter argues that the MacBook Neo is overhyped and that budget-constrained buyers should consider Windows alternatives offering better specs for the same price.
- The MacBook Neo
The $600 MacBook Neo uses an iPhone A18 Pro chip, offering solid basic performance and build quality, but commenters debate its value against cheaper Windows laptops with more RAM and storage.
- Introducing Fetch: the simplest way to read the web
Browserbase launched a Fetch API that lets AI agents retrieve page content without a full browser session, priced at $1 per 1,000 pages.
- Async Developer Platform
Async Developer Platform launches a low-latency TTS API with voice cloning, 15+ languages, and pricing starting at $0.50/hour, claiming faster response times than ElevenLabs and Cartesia.
- Apple MacBook Neo review: a budget-priced game-changer
The MacBook Neo, starting at $599, delivers a premium aluminum chassis and bright display that rarely feels like a budget laptop but lacks keyboard backlighting and labeled ports.
- No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user - Martin Alderson
The viral claim that Anthropic loses $5,000 per Claude Code Max subscriber confuses retail API prices with actual inference costs, which are roughly 10x lower.
- U.S. Gas Prices Jump Again as Oil Tops $90 for First Time in Years - The New York Times
U.S. gasoline prices reached an 18-month high as oil surpassed $90 per barrel, signaling further increases at the pump.
- Musician Billy Joel Sells Long Island Mansion for $28.75 Million - The New York Times
Billy Joel’s Long Island mansion sold for $28.75 million, $14 million below its original asking price, after years on the market.
- GPT-5.4 | Hacker News
OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 with a 1M token context window, native computer-use abilities, and improved reasoning, claiming state-of-the-art performance on professional knowledge work benchmarks.
Takes
Sometimes I feel like I'm overcomplicating my life trying to build a SaaS company when you can just build a directory site and make like $25,000 in one day lol
@yongfook
We bought 19 PB of flash storage for our AWS S3 exit in 2025 for about $1.5m. The list price for this setup today would be $19 MILLION 🤑. Don't know if I've ever timed a trade this well in my life. https://world.hey.com/dhh/it-s-five-grand-a-day-to-miss-our-s3-exit-b8293563
@dhh
what an incredible move from Tally 🤯 (not affliated) they made their form builder (almost) 100% free i find it incredible smart because: - they become the obvious choice for ChatGPT to recommend - serious big buyers will still buy - occasional buyers won't but they was churning anyway i am impressed 👏
@tibo_maker
My SaaS portfolio will become fully self-hostable. And like also fully open-source too. It's something we're working on. And I've been thinking about what I would actually charge for if I open-sourced my SaaS products. I don't think I would feature gate them. So my options are basically narrowed down to: - Hosting I'm all for self-hosting, and I'd absolutely encourage users to self-host my products. But some people will still want the convenience of a one-click setup with managed backups, monitoring and updates. Offering hosting to those users is probably the easiest revenue model. Ghost has built a great business around exactly this. - Enterprise Maybe we get bigger customers. They'll need SSO, permissions, audit logs and compliance. That's basically the n8n enterprise model. - Support If a company depends on the software, having an SLA and somebody to call when stuff breaks is worth real money. Red Hat has done this for decades. - Integrations WordPress is the obvious example here. Selling integrations/plugins. Right now, all my products are heavily gated. Closed-sourced, paywall gated, and little accessible. But honestly, I'd happily give away the code if it meant more people adopted the product. Software is getting cheaper to build and easier to copy anyway. Quick overview 👇
@SimonHoiberg
SaaS is dead? SaaS has always been dead. If... Your product doesn't fit. Your product is too expensive. Your messaging is a maze. You built a feature and called it a company. You raised a round instead of a customer base. Your costs are too high, your company too big. You sound like everyone else. You made buying hard. SaaS ain't dead unless it was already dead.
@jasonfried
as someone who spends more than $300,000 / month in AI models, I can tell you: you're being scammed Seedance 2.5 costs about $0.10 per second of video, bare minimum. that's the price WE pay. before upscaling, storage, retries, and all the generations you throw away. one 30-second video = ~$3 in pure model cost a normal creator iterates 3-10 times to get one so one good video = $15-30 now do "unlimited" at $59/month. two good videos and they're losing money. the math never works. so when you see "unlimited", it's always one of these: 1. a silent throttle (your 5-min renders become 60-min renders) 2. a quiet rename ("unlimited" becomes "enhanced fast" after you paid) 3. a moving start date (you were promised 7 days, you actually get 1) and it's likely all 3. I'd love to sell unlimited too. it would print signups. but I pay the model providers every month, and I'd rather show you a real price than rename your plan after checkout. if the math can't work, you're not looking at a price, you're looking at a scam
@tibo_maker
http://zoneless.com cost $1.2k, which I'm pretty happy with. ❤️.gg is still my favourite domain investment though!
@tinyprojectsdev
current monthly expenses for http://knockoff.co (most of which *scale up linearly* as more people use it)
@Shpigford
from $600/mo to $3000/mo here are 5 tactics that worked
@DanKulkov
few weeks ago, Fable 5 was so advanced it needed the gov and had to be taken offline. today, we have access to arguably better models for $20/month. took what? six weeks?
@shadcn
You could spend $235 for the OpenAI programmable keyboard (with knob), or you could spend $18 on Amazon for this programmable keyboard (with knob)
@BenjaminDEKR
emailing (by hand) every user that cancelled over the last 30 days and badgering them till I get a real answer if you exclude failed payments, acquisitions and shutdowns the results are mostly price any thoughts on how we could improve our pricing?
@frantzfries
Finally, the web has native monetization. Ads were not the only way.
@brian_armstrong
"Just use Vercel." "Just use Supabase." "Just use Clerk." Cool. Now your auth, database, and deployment are owned by 3 different companies who can change pricing whenever they want. And the rest of your product is wrapping OpenAI. At some point you have to ask yourself: what do I actually own here?
@SimonHoiberg
Introducing Voice Agent Builder: a no-code platform to create human-like voice agents with Grok Voice. Available today at $0.05 / min. http://x.ai/voice
@SpaceXAI
Kimi K2.7 Code vs Claude Fable 5: Landing pages that cost 94% less
@nutlope
less than 2 months after launching @postbridge_ i got an offer to buy it for $3,000 then 10 months after launching i got an offer to buy it for $1,000,000 i decided not to accept either offer and for awhile there when growth stalled i thought maybe i made a mistake but in the last few months MRR doubled and we're now at nearly $40K MRR.
@jackfriks
Finally, so sick! We all wanted to make this but the problem was Google owned the 3d data and charged a lot for it You made a web game using Google's 3d tiles and quickly your bill would be $10,000 Microsoft Flight Simulator runs on Microsoft's Bing Maps 3d data so that's why they can do it Now I hope Google gets more serious about this and adds real plane models and multiplayer with combat (Microsoft's Flight Simulator never allows that) which would be super fun
@levelsio
We heard you wanted to use Codex rate limit resets on your own time. Starting today, we’re rolling out the ability to save rate limit resets to use later. We’re starting Go, Plus, Pro, and Business users with one free reset:
@OpenAI
Fable is a good model. As with all new models, it is simultaneously excellent and entirely unremarkable (relative to other models). It is slow and expensive, and the "loops are all you need" discourse they are pushing is obvious in the context of someone using Fable-class models What I've found so far is that for broad scope design (code architecture) tasks, Fable is unremarkable. Or, not better enough to justify its cost and speed. But in highly targeted goal-oriented loops, it is another beast entirely. It is very slow but produces very good results. I let it churn on optimizing a SwiftUI-layout resolver in Go I wrote and it was able to bring it down to an order of magnitude I could not reach myself (micro => nanosecond scale). But it took 2 hours and $40 to do it and I had to claw back some changes it overfit to Apple Silicon. Still, very worth it. In comparison, for "implement this feature/change" iterative work, I ran head-to-head Fable vs GPT5.5 vs. GLM-5.1. They all produced equally acceptable final results, but GPT5/GLM did it in a couple minutes and Fable was churning away for 40 minutes. And GLM cost me less than a dollar, GPT5.5 ~$1.50, and Fable cost $9. You can see that in this context, interactively working with an agent is nonsense. Its too slow. You need to write loops to keep the agent working and you probably want to highly parallelize the work being done. As with all things, I think a balance makes sense... My sense is that I'd reserve Fable for targeted, surgical analysis and work. Not for daily driving everyday tasks. I'm going to keep spending a shitload of money (relatively) and maining Fable for the rest of the week to continue to judge, will report if anything changes. I'll continue to head-to-head as well.
@mitchellh
Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)
@SemiAnalysis_
📣We're updating the price of our Google AI Plus plan to $4.99/mo💰or local equivalent (down from $7.99), and doubling the included storage, from 200GB to 400GB ☁️. Now you can unlock tools to boost your productivity and creativity - and get more space to store your photos, videos and projects - for less.
@vikaskansalHQ
Realising Apple went public at under $2 billion and 15 times revenue in 1980. SpaceX wants you to buy at $2 trillion and 100 times revenue in 2026. That is not getting in early. That is being the exit for venture capitalists who have held this equity for years at a fraction of what you are being asked to pay. Almost none of the retail investors buying this IPO will read the 300 pages before the book closes on June 11. That is your entire competitive advantage right there.
@DamiDefi
DeepSeek's 10 trillion USD grand strategy
@bookwormengr
customers are increasingly asking us for certainty on capacity. as models get better, we expect that the world will be capacity-constrained for some time. we are offering discounted tokens for 1-3 year commits. (it also helps us plan, so hopefully a big win-win.)
@sama
You get 20 TB of free bandwidth for $4.99/mo at @Hetzner_Online Way way way way more than enough for most websites! I'm not sponsored by them, I don't even get discounts or anything, just a great deal!
@levelsio
compare tokens to requests. what does that tell you?
@badlogicgames
OpenAI Whisper API: $0.006/min → $0.36/hr ElevenLabs Speech-to-Text: $0.40/hr Deepgram: $0.0043/min → $0.26/hr AssemblyAI: $0.37/hr VibeVoice ASR: $0/hr 50+ languages. Full diarization. One pass. Microsoft just ended an industry.
@sairahul1
When Brave users told us they'd pay for a minimalist version of our browser, we listened. Brave Origin, now in Nightly, is a paid version of our browser for users who don't need all of Brave’s features but still want its leading privacy and ad blocker: https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=origin
@BraveNightly
So @brave just launched Brave Origin, a bare-bones, privacy-first browser without any ads, AI, or web3. It's $60. Unless you're on Linux, in which case it's free. Pic related (arch btw)
@o7laurence