Comment by horsawlarway

1 day ago

50k annually for a static set of weights is actually crazy, though.

As in - I make software for a living and they can fuck off. Produce the item. Sell the item at a cost you find reasonable. Convince me to buy it again with an upgrade that's worth buying.

Period.

There's no "service" happening here. If anything, the proposed cost model just makes me incredibly unlikely to engage at all, because it means they're going to insist on trying to track my users (a thing I don't like doing...) with whatever bloatware they shove into their "sdk".

They're not selling it to you/it doesn't come out of your salary?

They're selling it to your employer. You're literally not even the customer for this product. There's no need to get angry that they're charging enterprise/vendor rates for a product.

And it's free for up to 100k devices. If you are running anything on 100k devices you should be able to afford $0.50/device and. If you aren't then why do you care? It's still a very customer-permissive and flexible business model so I cannot understand why this is upsetting or offensive

  • they literally would be selling it to me.

    I deploy browser extensions to millions of devices, and small local models that I can run in that space are incredibly appealing.

    But the "per user" model is just especially difficult to justify here, and comes with a TON of fucking downsides like usage tracking, feature availability, and product structure (ex - is a trial user a user? how long? etc...)

    ---

    And it's not even like they're justifying it with model download support or caching... they shove it entirely onto hugging face, or have you self serve.

    As their literal target audience - I'd rather buy the weights for a fixed price (even a high one), and not let them influence my product design decisions with saas style pricing.