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Comment by jsunderland323

3 months ago

No it's all good and it's a fair point.

So from my vantage point we need some way to create revenue. We have tried to make as much of the tool free as we can. We do a 10% markup on tokens issued by us. That's better than cursor who does 25%. We support BYOK so you can use your own claude key, and vertex key. If you do that you are basically just paying us a flat troll tole of $16/month to use our entire frontend but you are free to be unbounded by a markup on your tokens. We actually prefer this because it's better unit economics for us. So please bring your own key!

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jsunderland323

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leobuskin  3 months ago

But here's the thing: most of your real audience doesn't have API keys (except a few enterprise-ish folks or startups who got credits). They already pay subscription(s) (and will continue to pay the maximum, which will keep growing). The entire token resale model creates a weird economy and interdependency that shouldn't exist in the first place. In the end, all the deals with top-tier labs will be changing, most middlemen will start manipulating the token exchange rate at some point, and there's no transparency or single source of trust. What's the Endspiel here?

  • jsunderland323  3 months ago

    Well, I'm saying I'm happy to not be involved in the resale token trade in general. I don't think enterprises are the only folks with API keys. There are a lot of people who might not be savvy or motivated enough to setup an API key with Anthropic, OpenAI or Vertex and in those cases we want them to be able to use our key to reduce user friction.

    It's not in our interest to resell tokens, it actually diminishes our margin but it's a must if you want to be accessible to folks who don't want to go sign up for an API key. We choose to delay launching by a couple of days so that people could bring their own keys because we don't want to be middle men if you don't want us to be.

    If you want to just pay me $16 a month to be a good IDE and inspector, I love that. That's the value I think we provide to you. We cannot control whatever manipulation of token prices occurs with other providers. All we can do is give you enough context for your prompts that you don't need the latest bleeding edge models to make edits to your react code with confidence. We aren't an AI company, we are a devtool that helps with prompting.