from Hacker News

Stop over-thinking AI subscriptions

by hboon on 6/3/25, 7:36 AM with 60 comments

  • by prepend on 6/3/25, 10:46 AM

    > I spent around $400 on o3 last month because I was banging my head against a wall with some really tricky code. When I hit truly difficult problems, throwing o3 at them for a few hours beats getting stuck in debugging rabbit holes for days.

    I wish I could get some examples of this. I remember asking seniors for help on problems and they could help in minutes what would take me hours. And, likewise, I’ve had people ask me for a minute of help to stop them being blocked for days.

    It surprised me that people would block for days and I wonder what that looked like. Do they just stare at the screen, walk around, play candy crush?

    I’m trying to figure out if the author is a junior, average, or senior programmer and what they get stuck on would be something that a good programmer learns how to debug around. So you can finally get a good ROI on being a good programmer by comparing the time to what an AI would cost.

  • by dgan on 6/3/25, 10:04 AM

    Tried Claude yesterday to help me extract rows from a financial statement PDf. Let's automate boring stuff !! After multiple failures , I did it myself

  • by jusomg on 6/3/25, 10:43 AM

    > Let’s be conservative and say $800/day (though I’d assume many of you charge more). The AI subscription math is a no-brainer. One afternoon saved per month = $200 in billable time. Claude Max pays for itself in 5 saved hours. Cursor pays for itself in 45 minutes.

    Is the argument that by using these AI subscriptions, you have free time that didn't have before and now you work less hours? Or that the extra productivity you get from that AI subscription allows you to charge more per hour? or maybe that you can do more projects simultaneously, and therefore get more $ per day?

    Otherwise I don't get how the AI subscription "pays for itself".

  • by hengheng on 6/3/25, 9:40 AM

    Or get a 3090 24 GB off eBay for 700€ and run mistral, devstral, qwen3 and others indefinitely.

    I'm a big fan of two-tier systems where the 90% case is taken on by something cheap, and renting the premium tier. Works for cars, server hosting, dining ...

  • by Joeboy on 6/3/25, 10:12 AM

    I don't know the author, but it seems like they're writing for a quite rarefied audience.

  • by tarasglek on 6/3/25, 3:09 PM

    These articles seem to justify spending money without considering alternatives It's like saying "cold meds let me get back to work, I am well justified paying $100/day for NyQuil".

    I would appreciate a less "just take my money" and more "here are features various tools offer for particular price, I chose x over y cos z". Would sound more informed.

    Would also like to see a reason on not using open source tools and locking yourself out of various further ai-integration opportunities because $200/mo service doesn't support em.

  • by samuel on 6/3/25, 10:58 AM

    Regarding the o3 "trick", if I understand it correctly, I'm trying to do something similar with the "MCP Super Assistant" paired with the DesktopCommander MCP.

    I still haven't managed to make the mcp proxy server reliable enough, but looks promising. If it works, the model would have pretty direct access to the codebase, although any tool call is requires a new chat box.

    I guess aider in copy-paste mode would be another solution for cheapskates like myself (not a dev and I barely do any programming, but I like to tinker).

  • by dakiol on 6/3/25, 10:46 AM

    I don’t want to pay to use LLM tools, just like I don’t pay for Linux, Git, or Postgres. Sadly, open source LLMs are way behind private LLMs (whereas Linux/Git/Postgres are top notch software better than private ones)

  • by its-summertime on 6/3/25, 11:42 AM

    Having money must be nice

  • by msgodel on 6/3/25, 11:00 AM

    I can run qwen2.5/qwen3 on my CPU and not think about it at all. No budget, no token limits, just completions whenever I want them.

  • by dedicate on 6/3/25, 10:03 AM

    Honestly, part of me just wants to pay a subscription so I don't have to think about any of that backend stuff. Like, isn't the 'it just works and I get the latest updates without lifting a finger' a huge unspoken benefit for most people? Or am I just being lazy here?

  • by brettermeier on 6/3/25, 10:45 AM

    Advertisements?

  • by cedws on 6/3/25, 10:17 AM

    Meh. Zed agent with my ordinary GitHub Copilot license works fine. Don’t see why I would pay an extra $180. Shallow ROI analyses don’t really tempt me.