200 is much less than the value you’re supposed to get out of it. If it’s not then yeah go ahead and use cheaper models with worst quality

Are you aware of how much purchasing power 200 dollars is in china, brazil, thailand or india is? This is an extremely arrogant take.

I’ve hired many asian developers anywhere from 1-4k a month.

I get a lot more out of a 200/mo subscription now in a week than I did from them in a month.

Now obviously in today’s world they’d be using a 200/mo subscription themselves. But it’s not like money is nothing, software development doesn’t scale down below 1k/mo for anyone competent even in the poorest areas.

The point the post you replied to is making is that while you get value out of it, and in your case it's not that expensive, it's just simply not the case worldwide

I don’t think you’re really reading between the lines.

Parent’s point was that many many people will get much more than $200 value from the “expensive” model. Sure, a Bihar farmer won’t, but even an Indian software developer may easily do if he or she has Western clients.

What's that got to do with the cost of a thing? Are tradesmen in Thailand entitled to Makita tools just because American plumbers can afford them? I'm struggling to understand the entitlement in some of the comments. And even though it doesn't matter I'd point out it's not like OpenAI or Anthropic are making enormous profits at the moment.

For the record, 200 USD is around 60% of the brazilian minimum wage.

How about brazilian median software developer wage ?

According to Glassdoor statistics, brazilian developers make between 600-1600 USD per month on average. Seniors might rise above 2000 USD.

So a 200 USD subscription falls between 10% and 33% of an average brazilian developer's salary.

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to get $200 of value out of personal use!

Note that 200 dollars of value is different than 200 dollars of profit.

I personally don’t find it that useful for most tasks, but if say, you get paid $50/hr for your work and it saves you more than 4 hours of work in a month, there you go.

Obviously this assumes that you can find 4+ extra hours of $50/hr work every month, or you can work 4 hours less. Neither of these assumptions is correct for people who work for a fixed salary.

I think this is the rub the enterprise will be forced to grapple with. Not everyone is going to get $200 worth of value for the organization. In fact since it's not a restricted tool some will waste time and company resources using it. Undoubtedly some will get the value out of it, but it's very likely, that these are the same people providing more than what they're paid already. Nothing has changed other than, potentially, time savings and (hopefully) output improvement. Neither of those are any sort of guarantee though, either. Subjective systems are hard to show value, especially in the long term.

That doesn’t change value. It’s value whether or not you can maintain a profit over it.

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Here most of my colleagues have +200 dollar rates. It's really a no brainer. But sure, in south America or some Asian countries maybe it is. But still most devs need it anyway. Also in the poor regions.

In Sweden $200 is ~5% of average programmer monthly income after tax. $200/h rate is not a representative salary for SEs in South America, Asian countries nor Europe.

If you're running a business I agree it's a no-brainer, but the context here is for personal projects.

Come on. The 200 spend on Claude is easily earned back. A few hours of work maximum.

$200/h is on the extreme end and I would argue most people here aren't anywhere close to that.

The median hourly wage in the US is $28/h, this equates to nearly 7.5 hours. A full day of work a month for the average person to use Claude with reasonable limits.

Yes, the people on $28/h may not be the software development types, so their income might not be as high, but these are the people who would probably be vibe coding the most since they aren't day to day programmers!

I suspect the reply above is referring to charge out rates rather than wages.

My fault, thanks for the correction (:

Most of the world's developers, even in not-poor regions, make significantly less than what your colleagues charge.

Unless that value is $200 cash in hand it will be hard to afford it for people who just don't have $200.

Last time you bought a computer, did you buy the absolute fastest best CPU available?

Yes, but that was because I could see the writing on the wall with respect to hardware prices being cooked by AI demand, so I built the best computer possible at the time knowing it'd probably need to last me the next 5+ years

So not really comparable. I use Step 3.7 Flash locally, models are good enough for so many coding tasks even at the lower end! (Though I note that calling a 200B model "lower end" is kind of amusing)

I've actually come to believe the overwhelming majority of use cases require nowhere frontier quality so there's that. Much faster execution is just a bonus on top of the much reduced cost