[HN Gopher] Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based
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Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-09-24 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| input_sh wrote:
| Entirely predictable and what should've been done from the start
| instead of this bait-and-switch mere months after introducing
| agentic editing.
| relativeadv wrote:
| is this effectively what Cursor did as well? I seem to remember
| some major pricing change of their in the past few months.
| input_sh wrote:
| In a way I would say they were even worse, instead of
| outright saying "we've increased our prices", they "clarified
| their pricing".
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| How much are companies spending per developer on tokens? From
| what I read it seems like it might be quite high at $1,000 or
| more per day?
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| No, not at all! At my org it's around $7000 a month for the
| entire org - my personal usage is around $2-10 a day. Usually
| less than the price of my caffeinated beverages.
| binwang wrote:
| Now I see little value in subscribing to Zed Pro compared to just
| bringing my own API key. Am I missing something?
| prasoon2211 wrote:
| Presumably the tab based edit-prediction model + $5 of tokens
| is worth the (new) $10 / mo price.
|
| Though from everything I've read online, Zed's edit prediction
| model is far, _far_ behind that of Cursor.
| agrippanux wrote:
| Their burn agent mode is pretty badass, but is super costly to
| run.
|
| I'm a big fan of Zed but tbf I'm just using Claude Code + Nvim
| nowadays. Zed's problem with their Claude integration is that
| it will never be as good as just using the latest from Claude
| Code.
| morgankrey wrote:
| (I work at Zed) No, you aren't. We care about you using Zed the
| editor, and we provide Zed Pro for folks who decide they'd like
| to support Zed or our billing model works for them. But it's
| simply an option, not our core business plan, and this pricing
| is in place to make that option financially viable for us. As
| long as we don't bear the cost, we don't feel the need (or the
| right) to put ourselves in the revenue path with LLM spend.
| jsheard wrote:
| > [Zed Pro is] not our core business plan
|
| What is the core business plan then?
| morgankrey wrote:
| https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-
| deltadb-o...
| maxbond wrote:
| Will you consider providing a feature to protect me from
| accidentally using my Zed account after the $5 is exhausted
| (or else a plan that only includes edit predictions)? I can't
| justify to myself continuing my subscription if there's a
| risk I will click the wrong button with identical text to the
| right button, and get charged an additional 10% for it. I get
| you need to be compensated for risk if you pay up front on my
| behalf, but I don't need you to do that.
|
| I understand that there's nothing you could do to protect me
| if I make a prompt that ends up using >$5 of usage but after
| that I would like Zed to reject anything except my personal
| API keys.
| morgankrey wrote:
| Yep, you can set your spend limit to $0 and it will block
| any spend beyond your $10 per month for the subscription
|
| https://zed.dev/docs/ai/plans-and-usage#usage-spend-limits
| maxbond wrote:
| Excellent. Thanks.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I'm curious if there's any way to completely disable/remove
| `zed.dev` provider from Zed, while keeping others available?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| If you sign out of zed, zed's providers don't work. I
| believe you still see them in the AI panel, but it won't
| operate.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Token based pricing generally makes a lot of sense for companies
| like Zed, but it sure does suck for forecasting spend.
|
| Usage pricing on something like aws is pretty easy to figure out.
| You know what you're going to use, so you just do some simple
| arithmetic and you've got a pretty accurate idea. Even with
| serverless it's pretty easy. Tokens are so much harder,
| especially when using it in a development setting. It's so hard
| to have any reasonable forecast about how a team will use it, and
| how many tokens will be consumed.
|
| I'm starting to track my usage with a bit of a breakdown in the
| hope that I'll find a somewhat reliable trend.
|
| I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud
| FinOps.
| prasoon2211 wrote:
| This is partially why, at least for LLM-assisted coding
| workloads, orgs are going with the $200 / mo Claude Code plans
| and similar.
| jsheard wrote:
| Until the rug inevitably gets pulled on those as well. It's
| not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription unless you
| use >$200 of tokens per month, and long term it's not in
| their interest to sell you >$200 of tokens for a flat $200.
| Hamuko wrote:
| The pricing model works as long as people (on average)
| think they need >$200 worth of tokens per month but
| actually do something less, like $170/month. Is that
| happening? No idea.
| jsheard wrote:
| Maybe that is what Anthropic is banking on, from what I
| gather they obscure Max accounts actual token spend so
| it's hard for subscribers to tell if they're getting
| their moneys worth.
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1109
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, the $200/mo plan model works as long as people on
| the $100/mo plan is insufficient for some people which
| works as long as the $17/mo plan is insufficient for some
| people.
|
| I don't see how it matters to you that you aren't
| saturating your $200 plan. You have it because you hit
| the limits of the $100/mo plan.
| KallDrexx wrote:
| I don't know about for people using CC on a regular
| basis, but according to `ccusage`, I can trivially go
| over $20 of API credits in a few days of hobby use. I'd
| presume if you are paying for a $200 plan then you know
| you have heavy usage and can easily exceed that.
| jopsen wrote:
| It's probably easier (and hence, cheaper) to finance the
| AI infrastructure investments if you have a lot of
| recurring subscriptions.
|
| There is probably a lot of value in predictability.
| Meaning it might be visible for a $200, to offer more
| tokens than $200.
| baq wrote:
| meanwhile me hiding from accounting for spending $500 on
| cursor max mode in a day
| typpilol wrote:
| Did you actually get 500 bucks worth of work out of it?
| sellyme wrote:
| > It's not in your interest buy a $200/mo subscription
| unless you use >$200 of tokens per month
|
| This is only true if you can find someone else selling them
| at cost.
|
| If a company has a product that cost them $150, but they
| would ordinarily sell piecemeal for a total of $250,
| getting a stable recurring purchase at $200 might be
| worthwhile to them while still being a good deal for the
| customer.
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| > I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in
| cloud FinOps.
|
| It already is. There's been a lot of talk and development
| around FinOps for AI and the challenges that come with that.
| For companies, forecasting token usage and AI costs is non-
| trivial for internal purposes. For external products, what's
| the right unit economic? $/token, $/agentic execution, etc? The
| former is detached from customer value, the latter is hard to
| track and will have lots of variance.
|
| With how variable output size can be (and input), it's a tricky
| space to really get a grasp on at this point in time. It'll
| become a solved problem, but right now, it's the Wild West.
| mdasen wrote:
| I agree that tokens are a really hard metric for people. I
| think most people are used to getting something with a certain
| amount of capacity per time and dealing with that. If you get a
| server from AWS, you're getting a certain amount of capacity
| per time. You still might not know what it's going to cost you
| to do what you want - you might need more capacity to run your
| website than you think. But you understand the units that are
| being billed to you and it can't spiral out of control
| (assuming you aren't using autoscaling or something).
|
| When you get Claude Code's $20 plan, you get "around 45
| messages every 5 hours". I don't really know what that means.
| Does that mean I get 45 total conversations? Do minor followups
| count against a message just as much as a long initial prompt?
| Likewise, I don't know how many messages I'll use in a 5 hour
| period. However, I do understand when I start bumping up
| against limits. If I'm using it and start getting limited, I
| understand that pretty quickly - in the same way that I might
| understand a processor being slower and having to wait for
| things.
|
| With tokens, I might blow through a month's worth of tokens in
| an afternoon. On one hand, it makes more sense to be flexible
| for users. If I don't use tokens for the first 10 days, they
| aren't lost. If I don't use Claude for the first 10 days, I
| don't get 2,160 message credits banked up. Likewise, if I know
| I'm going on vacation later, I can't use my Claude messages in
| advance. But it's just a lot easier for humans to understand
| bumping up against rate limits over a more finite period of
| time and get an intuition for what they need to budget for.
| Filligree wrote:
| Both prefill and decode count against Claude's subscriptions;
| your conversations are N^2 in conversation length.
|
| My mental model is they're assigning some amount of API
| credits to the account and billing the same way as if you
| were using tokens, shutting off at an arbitrary point. The
| point also appears to change based on load / time of day.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Also seems like a great idea to create a business models where
| the companies aren't incentivised to provide the best product
| possible. Instead they'll want to create a product just useful
| enough to not drive away users, but just useless enough to temp
| people to go up a tier, "I'm so close, just one more prompt and
| it will be right this time!"
|
| Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about Zed. I'm talking about
| the companies make the models.
| potlee wrote:
| While Apple is incentivized to ship a smaller battery to cut
| costs, it is also incentivized to make their software
| efficient as possible to make the best use of the battery
| they do ship
| scuff3d wrote:
| That's not the same thing at all.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the
| difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that
| the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the
| vendor...."the house always wins"
|
| https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...
| coder543 wrote:
| There are enough vendors that it's difficult for any one
| vendor to charge too much per token. There are also a lot of
| really good open-weight models that your business could self-
| host if the hosted vendors _all_ conspire to charge too much
| per token. (I believe it 's only economical to self-host big
| models if you're using _a lot_ of tokens, so there is a
| breakeven point.)
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Token based pricing works for the company, but not for the
| user.
| qsort wrote:
| I wonder if first-party offerings like Codex and Claude will
| follow suit. Most "agents" are utter nonsense, but they cooked
| with the CLI tools. It'd be a shame to let go of them.
| hashbig wrote:
| Eventually that is the plan. Like we saw with Claude Code, they
| want developers to get a taste of that unlimited and
| unrestrained power of a state of the art model like Opus 4,
| then slowly limit usage until you fully transition to metered
| billing and deprecate subscription based billing.
| prymitive wrote:
| I can imagine the near future where companies "sponsor" open
| source projects by donating tokens to "mine" a PR for a feature
| they need.
| ebrescia wrote:
| I love this! Finally a more direct way for companies to sponsor
| open source development. GitHub Sponsors helps, but it is often
| so vague where the funding is going.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| More often than not, for individuals, it's barely
| contributing to their living costs
| scuff3d wrote:
| If companies want to help they can just... I don't know...
| give projects some money
| drakythe wrote:
| Unless companies also donate money to sponsor the code review
| that will be required to be done by real human being I could
| see this idea being a problem for maintainers. Yes you have
| to code review a human being as well but a human being is
| capable of learning and carrying that learning forward and
| their next PR will be better, as well as being able to look
| at past PRs to evaluate whether the user is a troll/bad actor
| or someone who genuinely wants to assist with the project. An
| LLM won't learn and will always spit out valid _looking_
| code.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| But the reason LLMs aren't used to build features isn't because
| they are expensive.
|
| The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the
| scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what
| kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with,
| what kind of other components can be extended to support it,
| (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| This whole business model of trying to shave off or arbitrage a
| fraction of the money going to OpenAI and Anthropic just sucks.
| And it seems precarious. There's no honest way to resell tokens
| at a profit, and everyone knows it.
| Havoc wrote:
| >There's no honest way to resell tokens at a profit, and
| everyone knows it.
|
| Agree with the sentiment, but I do think there are edge cases.
|
| e.g. I could see a place like openrouter getting away with a
| tiny fractional markup based on the value they provide in the
| form of having all providers in one place
| Lalabadie wrote:
| The issue with a model like this (fixed small percentage) is
| that your biggest clients are the most incentivized to move
| away.
|
| At scale, OpenRouter will instead get you the lower high-
| volume fees they themselves get from their different
| providers.
| thelastbender12 wrote:
| Sorry, how is this new pricing anything but honest? They
| provide an editor you can use to - optimize the context you
| send to the LLM services - interact with the output that comes
| out of them
|
| Why does not justify charging a fraction of your spend on the
| LLM platform? This is pretty much how every service business
| operates.
| hu3 wrote:
| There's now greater incentive for Zed to stuff more content
| in the prompts to inflate tokens used and thus profit more.
| Or at least be less zealous.
|
| This is not a new concern. And is not unique to Zed.
| drakythe wrote:
| For companies where that is their entire business model I
| absolutely agree. Zed is a solid editor with additional LLM
| integration features though, so this move would seem to me to
| just cover their costs + some LLM integration development
| funds. If their users don't want to use the LLM then no skin
| off Zed's back unless they've signed some guaranteed usage
| contract.
| dinvlad wrote:
| The whole business model even for OAI/Anthropic is
| unsustainable.. they are already running it at a huge loss atm,
| and will do for the foreseeable future. The economics simply
| doesn't work, unfortunately or not
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Am I wrong in that GitHub Copilot Pro apparently has the best
| overall token spend when considering agentic editors?
| ramon156 wrote:
| Better than Gemini Pro 2.5? Github Copilot doesn't even support
| tooling in Zed yet. It's been months..
| hu3 wrote:
| $10 GitHub Copilot Pro plan works for me in VSCode.
|
| I've been exclusively using Claude Sonnet 4 model in VSCode and
| so far I've used 90% of the premium quota at the end of the
| months. I can always use GPT4.1 or GPT5-mini for free if need
| be.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I've been using since its release as well.
| I don't really see a point in trying the competition. It
| can't be better than this.
| genshii wrote:
| I'm personally looking forward to this change because I currently
| pay $20/month just to get edit prediction. I use Claude Code in
| my terminal for everything else. I do wish I could _just_ pay for
| edit prediction at an even lower price, but I can understand why
| that 's not an option.
|
| I'm curious if they have plans to improve edit prediction though.
| It's honestly kind of garbage compared to Cursor, and I don't
| think I'm being hyperbolic by calling it garbage. Most of the
| time it's suggestions aren't helpful, but the 10-20% of the time
| it _is_ helpful is worth the cost of the subscription for me.
| morgankrey wrote:
| We have a significant investment underway in edit predictions.
| We hear you, more soon.
| genshii wrote:
| That's great to hear, thanks!
| sippeangelo wrote:
| This is the one thing keeping me from switching from Cursor.
| I much prefer Zed in every other way. Exciting!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, Cursor tab completion is basically in the realm of
| magical mind reading and might still be the most insane
| productivity demonstration of LLM tech in software.
|
| It obsoleted making Vim macros and multiline editing for
| example. Now you just make one change and the LLM can
| derive the rest; you just press tab.
|
| It's interesting that the Cursor team's first iteration is
| still better than anything I've seen in their competitors.
| It's been an amazing moat for a year(?) now.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| I agree. I wish they focused more on it. I'd love to be
| able to give it a few sentences of instructions to make
| it even more effective for me. It's so much more of a
| productivity boon than all the coding agent stuff ever
| was.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I could say the same about the AI-assisted autocomplete
| in IDEA. Wonder how they compare...
| pkilgore wrote:
| This is very very exciting.
| inerte wrote:
| That's been my workflow also. Claude Code / OpenAI Codex most
| of the time, when I have to edit files Cursor's auto-complete
| is totally worth the $20.
| chewz wrote:
| I have never used Zed predictions but $20 for 500 prompts is
| quite a good deal. I use it mostly with Opus for some hard
| cases.
| typpilol wrote:
| 10 bucks on copilot and you get unlimited + unlimited gpt4.1
| etc
|
| Copilot is the best value by far
| okokwhatever wrote:
| This is going to be a blood bath for many freelancers if the
| trend continues with other platforms. Mark my words.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Good change. I'm not a vibe coder, I use Zed Pro llm integration
| more like glorified stack overflow. I value Zed more for being an
| amazing editor for the code I actually write and understand.
|
| I suspect I'm not alone on this. Zed is not the editor for
| hardcore agentic editing and that's fine. I will probably save
| money on this transition while continuing to support this great
| editor for what it truly shines at: editing source code.
| AbuAssar wrote:
| Zed and Warp were two promising Rust-based projects that I
| closely monitor. Currently, both projects are progressing towards
| becoming a generic AI Agentic code platform.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Until now I've never really come across a comment on Hackernews
| I thought was AI generated...
| AbuAssar wrote:
| You are partially right, after I wrote the comment I used the
| writing tools in macOS to rewrite it in a professional tone.
|
| The wording may sound AI generated but the gist of the
| comment is my true opinion
| muratsu wrote:
| For those of us building agentic tools that require similar
| pricing, how does one implement it? OpenRouter seems good for the
| MVP, but I'm curious if there are alternatives down the line.
| VGHN7XDuOXPAzol wrote:
| > Token-agnostic prompt structures obscure the cost and are rife
| with misaligned incentives
|
| Saying that, token-based pricing has misaligned incentives as
| well: as the editor developer (charging a margin over the number
| of tokens) or AI provider, you benefit from more verbose input
| fed to the LLMs and of course more verbose output from the LLMs.
|
| Not that I'm really surprised by the announcement though, it was
| somewhat obviously unsustainable
| dmix wrote:
| I just asked this exact question about Zed pricing 2 days ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45333425
| dinobones wrote:
| Making this prediction now, LLM pricing will eventually be priced
| in bytes.
|
| Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image
| "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. Also,
| it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization
| is different.
|
| Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed. Just
| like bandwidth. I'm surprised this hasn't already happened.
| vtail wrote:
| Hm... why not tokens as reported by each LLM provider? They
| already handle pricing for images etc.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| The problem is that tokens don't all equate to the same size. A
| megabyte of some random json is a LOT more tokens than a
| megabyte of "Moby Dick".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image
| "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token.
|
| For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens
| are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason
| video tokens wouldn't also be. (If models also switch
| architecture and multimodal diffusion models, say, become more
| common, then, sure, a different pricing model more tied to
| actual compute cost drivers for that architecture are likely
| but... even that isn't likely to be bytes.)
|
| > Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because
| tokenization is different.
|
| That's a reason for incumbents to prefer _not_ to switch,
| though, not a reason for them to switch.
|
| > Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed.
|
| More likely they would be in floatint point operations expended
| processing them, but using tokens (which are the primary
| drivers for the current LLM architectures) will probably
| continue as long as the architecture itself is doninant.
| oblio wrote:
| > For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image
| tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no
| reason video tokens wouldn't also be.
|
| In classical computing, there is a clear hierarchy: text <
| images <<< video.
|
| Is there a reason why video computing using LLMs shouldn't be
| much more intensive and therefore costly than text or image
| output?
| Filligree wrote:
| Of course it's more expensive. It's still tokens, but
| considerably more of them.
| oblio wrote:
| That's the thing, I can't visualize (and I don't think
| most people can) what "tokens" represent for image or
| video outputs.
|
| For text I just assume them to be word stems or more like
| work-family-members (cat-feline-etc).
|
| For images and videos I guess each character, creature,
| idea in it is a token? Blue sky, cat walking around,
| gentleman with a top hat, multiplied by the number of
| frames?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For images and videos I guess each character, creature,
| idea in it is a token?
|
| No, for images, tokens would, I expect, usually be
| asymptotically proportional to the area of the image
| (this is certainly the case with input token for OpenAIs
| models that take image inputs; outputs are more opaque);
| you probably won't have a neat one-to-one intuition for
| what one token represents, but you don't need that for it
| to be useful and straightforward for understanding
| pricing, since the mathematical relationship of tokens to
| size can be published and the size of the image is a
| known quantity. (And videos conceptually could be like
| images with an additional dimension.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, it'll certainly be more expensive in any conceivable
| model that handles all three modalities, but if the model
| uses an architecture like current autoregressive, token-
| based multimodal LLMs/VLMs, tokens will make just as much
| sense as the basis for pricing, and be similarly
| straightforward, as with text and images.
| efskap wrote:
| To clarify, "as straightforward" = same dimensionality? I
| guess it would have to be, to be usable in the same embedding
| space.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Why this instead of cpu/gpu time?
| typpilol wrote:
| I'm assuming token count and usage is pretty closely tied
| antiframe wrote:
| CPU/GPU time is opaque to me before I send my data, but
| tokens I can count before I decide to send it. That means I
| can verify the metering. With CPU time I send the data and
| then the company says "That cost X CPU units, which is $500".
| mhuffman wrote:
| No one is going to give up token-based pricing. The main
| players can twiddle their models to make anything any amount of
| tokens they choose.
| vtail wrote:
| Prediction: the only remaining providers of AI-assisted tools in
| a few years will be the LLM companies themselves (think claude
| code, codex, gemini, future xai/Alibaba/etc.), via CLIs +
| integrations such as ASP.
|
| There is very little value that a company that _has_ to support
| multiple different providers, such as Cursor, can offer on top of
| tailored agents (and "unlimited" subscription models) by LLM
| providers.
| computerex wrote:
| I don't know. Foundation models are very good, and you can get
| a surprising amount of mileage from them by using them with low
| level interfaces. But personally I think companies building
| development tools of the future will use LLMs to build systems
| with increasing capabilities. I think a lot of engineering
| challenges remain in scaling LLM's to take over day to day in
| programming, and the current tools are scratching the surface
| of what's possible when you combine LLMs with traditional
| systems engineering.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| I recently started using Codex (OpenAI's Claude Code) and it
| has a VSCode extension that works like a charm. I tried out
| Windsurf a while ago. And the Codex extension simply does
| everything that Windsurf did. I guess it doesn't show changes
| at well, (it shows diffs in it's own window instead of in the
| file), but I can just check a git diff graphically (current
| state vs. HEAD) if I really wanted that.
|
| I am really tempted to buy ChatGPT Pro, and probably would have
| if I lived in a richer country (unfortunetley purchase power
| parity doesn't equalize for tech products). The problem with
| Windsurf (and presumably Cursor and others) is that you buy the
| IDE subscription and then still have to worry about usage
| costs. With Codex/Claude Code etc., yeah, it's expensive, but,
| as long as you're within the usage limits, which are hopefully
| reasonable for the most expensive prices, you don't have to
| worry about it. AND you get the web and phone apps with GPT 5
| Pro, etc.
| rudedogg wrote:
| If you look at even the Claude/OpenAI chat UIs, they kind of
| suck. Not sure why you think someone else can't/won't do it
| better. Yes, the big players will copy what they can, but they
| also need to chase insane growth and getting every human on
| earth paying for an LLM subscription.
|
| A tool that is good for everyone is great for no one.
|
| Also, I think we're seeing the limits on "value" of a chat
| interface already. Now they're all chasing developers since
| there's a real potential to improve productivity (or sadly cut-
| costs) there. But even that is proving difficult.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| I completely get why this pricing is needed and it seems fair.
| There's a major flaw in the announcement though.
|
| I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page
| says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not
| clear:
|
| - Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both?
|
| - What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it
| varies by model and is " API list price +10%", but nowhere does
| it say what these API list prices are. Am I meant to go to The
| OpenAI, Anthropic, and other websites to get that pricing
| information? Shouldn't that be in a table on that page which each
| hosted model listed?
|
| --
|
| I'm only a very casual user of AI tools so maybe this is clear to
| people deep in this world, but it's not clear to me just based on
| Zelda pricing page exactly how far $5 per month will get me.
| morgankrey wrote:
| List here: https://zed.dev/docs/ai/models. Thanks for the
| feedback, we'll make sure this is linked from the pricing page.
| Think it got lost in the launch shuffle.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| All makes sense. I presumed it was an oversight.
|
| It's hard for me to conceptualise what a million tokens
| actually looks like, but I don't think there's a way around
| that aside from making proving some concrete examples of
| inputs, outputs, and the number of tokens that actually is. I
| guess it would become clearer after using it a bit.
| morgankrey wrote:
| Now live: https://zed.dev/pricing#what-is-a-token. Thanks
| for the feedback
| bananapub wrote:
| seems fine - they're aligning their prices with their costs.
|
| presumably everyone is just aiming or hoping for inference costs
| to go down so much that they can do a unlimited-with-tos like
| most home Internet access etc, because this intermediate phase of
| having to count your pennies to ask the matrix multiplier
| questions isn't going to be very enjoyable or stable or encourage
| good companies to succeed.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I was just thinking this morning about how I think Zed should
| rethink their subscription because its a bit pricey if they're
| going to let you just use Claude Code. I am in the process of
| trying out Claude and figured just going to them for the
| subscriptions makes more sense.
|
| I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid
| AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your
| devs to look at different code files and discuss them. I might
| still pay for Zed's subscription in order to support them long
| term regardless.
|
| I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your
| subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point
| of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a
| browser?
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use
| your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's
| the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM
| in a browser?
|
| This is her another reason why CLI-based coding agents will
| win. Every editor out there trying to be the middle man between
| you and an AI provider is nuts.
| oblio wrote:
| Wouldn't the last step just be an API? That would allow
| direct integration from everywhere.
| praseodym wrote:
| There is one, developed by the Zed team in collaboration
| with Gemini. And Claude Code is also supported now.
|
| https://agentclientprotocol.com/overview/introduction
| ibejoeb wrote:
| > if they're going to let you just use Claude Code
|
| I'm pretty sure that's only while it's in preview, just like
| they were giving away model access before that was formally
| launched. Get it while it's hot.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Another one bites the dust :-( I hope at least Windsurf stays the
| same..
| pkilgore wrote:
| This is much better for me but I really want a plan that includes
| zero AI other than edit prediction and BYOK for the rest.
|
| But as a mostly claude max + zed user happy to see my costs go
| down.
| blutoot wrote:
| Why is most of the AI-tooling industry still stuck on this "bring
| your own key" model?
| sethhochberg wrote:
| What would you propose as an alternative?
|
| As a corporate purchaser, "bring your own key" is just about
| the only way we can allow our employees to stay close to the
| latest happenings in a rapidly moving corner of the industry.
|
| We need to have a decent amount of trust in the model execution
| environment and we don't like having tons of variable-cost
| subscriptions. We have that trust in our corporate-managed
| OpenAI tenant and have good governance and budget controls
| there, so BYOK lets us have flexibility to put different
| frontends in front of our trusted execution environment for
| different use cases.
| Macha wrote:
| The companies actually providing the models charge by token and
| this lets the tooling avoid having to do cost planning for
| something with a bunch of unknowns and push the risk of
| overspend to customers.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my
| opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it
| just isn't there yet for me. It's shameful because I like its
| aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there.
|
| Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of
| advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this
| giant text file I had instantly and let me work on it.
|
| I then tried opening this 1GB text file to do a simple
| find/replace on it only to find macOS run out of system memory
| with Zed quickly using 20gb of memory for that search operation.
|
| I then switched to vscode, which, granted opened it in a buffered
| sort of way and limited capability, but got the job done.
|
| Maybe that was a me issue I don't know, but aside from this one-
| off, it doesn't have a good extensions support in the community
| for my needs yet. I hope it gets there!
| j_bum wrote:
| VSCode is my go to for large text file interaction on macOS.
|
| TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven't tested it
| for large files before.
| dewey wrote:
| I have Sublime Text installed for the onlu use case of
| opening large files. Nothing comes close.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Googling around a bit, Sublime Text doesn't seem to be
| particularly good at this:
| https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/unable-to-open-a-large-
| text-...
|
| In my experience, BBEdit will open files that kill other
| editors: "Handling large files presents no intrinsic
| problems for BBEdit, though some specific operations may be
| limited when dealing with files over 2GB in size."
| xrisk wrote:
| While I don't know if the claim is true, you've linked a
| post from 2012...
| roto wrote:
| I have always found sublime to be the best at large
| files, well over 1gb. Since you mention bbedit, maybe
| this is some mac specific issue? I really don't know. But
| at least among people i know, opening large files has
| effectively become its main USP.
|
| Should be noted that the linked post is almost 15 years
| old at this point too, so perhaps not the most up to date
| either.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Speaking of TextEdit, I like what the folks at CodeEdit are
| doing. They are moving slow and focusing on just the core
| parts. Maybe I should go give them a try too!
| typpilol wrote:
| Vscode has a special optimizations in place for large files.
| That's why it works so good.
|
| You can actually disable it in the settings if you want it to
| try and render the entire thing at once
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Similar experience: I added a folder to my zed project that was
| too big, causing zed to lock up and eventually crash. But
| because the default setting was to re-open projects on launch,
| I was stuck in a loop where I couldn't remove the folder
| either. Eventually found a way to clear the recent projects,
| load an empty editor, and change the setting to avoid it in the
| future.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Ok, how big was your project?
|
| My JetBrains IDEs (RustRover, Goland) probably would have
| choked out too.
| tux3 wrote:
| You can open large codebases in Jetbrains IDEs and it takes
| forever to index, but it shouldn't outright crash or
| completely freeze.
|
| You can open the kernel in CLion. Don't expect the advanced
| refactoring features to work, but it can deal with a ~40
| million lines project folder for example
| silverwind wrote:
| Big files/projects is where Sublime really shines. I hope Zed
| can replicate that performance.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI
| was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source
| alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Yeah exactly this! I get they want to stay in the game and
| follow the market, but I'm sad they're not being more
| aggressive on that original vision. I still think there could
| be a huge payoff for them if they invested more on their
| brand and aesthetics of a more polished and comfy editor.
|
| The way I see it, we're sort of living in a world where UX is
| king. (Looking at you Cursor)
|
| I feel like there's a general sentiment where folks just want
| a sense of home with their tools more than anything. Yes they
| need to work, but they also need to work for you in your way.
| Cursor reinvented autocomplete with AI and that felt like
| home for most, what's next? I see so much focus on Agents but
| to me personally that feels more like it should live on the
| CI/CD layer of things. Editors are built for humans,
| something isn't quite there yet, excited to see how it
| unfolds.
| bombcar wrote:
| If the full magnitude of products that stopped working on the
| main product and started to try to shoehorn AI in was known,
| the economy would collapse overnight.
| kace91 wrote:
| It really is concerning. I keep an excel sheet with links
| of all companies I could apply to whenever i change jobs,
| and checking it the other day practically every row was now
| selling an ai product.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| Intellij wasn't immune to it either. Number of bugs has
| exploded since they started adding ai features to their
| ide, none of which I used for more than 5 minutes.
| hakanensari wrote:
| I think their recent push to delegate to CLI agents in the
| agent panel is the right direction. Claude Code has been
| running in Zed for the past month. Sure, there are SDK
| limitations and kinks to iron out, but it's moving quickly.
| I'm into it.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I get what you are saying, and I think they are doing a
| good job there as well. That said, it still feels like
| something is missing in that whole workflow to me.
|
| I sometimes worry if we are moving too fast for no reason.
| Some things are becoming standards in an organic way but
| they feel suboptimal in my own little bias bubble corner.
|
| Maybe I am getting old and struggling to adapt to the new
| generation way of getting work done, but I have a gut
| feeling that we need to revisit some of this stuff more
| deliberately.
|
| I still see Agents as something that will be more like a
| background thread that yields rather than a first class
| citizen inside the Editor you observe as it goes.
|
| I don't know about you, but I feel an existential dread
| whenever I prompt an Agent and turn into a vegetable
| watching it breathe. -- am I using it wrong? Should I be
| leaving and coming back later? Should I pick a different
| file and task while it's doing its thing?
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| There have been improvements recently, but it still has some
| of the worst text rendering of any editor on macOS, if you
| have a non-4K display plugged in. Rendering text is kind of a
| big deal!
| mr90210 wrote:
| Speaking of aesthetics, I switched back to VSCode but I ended
| up installing the theme "Zed One Theme" and switched the
| editor's font to "IBM Plex Mono".
|
| I know it's not Zed, but I am pretty satisfied with the
| results.
| shafyy wrote:
| Zed is the opposite of Sublime. Zed is VC funded and will
| eventually be enshittified. Sublime is not and has been going
| strong for many years.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Yeah fair point. I think CodeEdit is a perhaps a closer
| comparison there
| jeltz wrote:
| My experience with Zed was that it was a buggy mess with
| strange defaults. I had high hopes until I tried it but it was
| not even close to working for my pretty normal use case of
| coding C so I went back to Sublime.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| same.
|
| I reported some issue a few months back but saw they have
| thousands to deal with so mine will understandably stay open
| forever.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| CotEditor is quite good with very large files.
|
| https://github.com/coteditor/CotEditor
| epolanski wrote:
| They don't care about the editor anymore, it's all about
| becoming millionaires.
| bitwize wrote:
| Thought this was 2015 for a sec and this was about Zed Shaw.
| acaloiar wrote:
| Tokens are an implementation detail that have no business being
| part of product pricing.
|
| It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of
| converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are
| familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least
| they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to
| untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value".
|
| When the value customers receive from tokens slips, they pay the
| same price for the service. But generative AI companies are under
| no obligation to refund anything, because the customer paid for
| tokens, and they got tokens in return. Customers have to trust
| that they're being given the highest quality tokens the provider
| can generate. I don't have that trust.
|
| Additionally, they have to trust that generative AI companies
| aren't padding results with superfluous tokens to hit revenue
| targets. We've all seen how much fluff is in default LLM
| responses.
|
| Pinky promises don't make for healthy business relationships.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Doesn't prompt pricing obfuscate token costs by definition? I
| guess the alternative is everyone pays $500/mo. (And you'd
| still get more value than that.)
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Tokens aren't that much more opaque than RAM GB/s for functions
| or whatever. You'd have to know the entire infra stack to
| really understand it. I don't really have a suggestion for a
| better unit for that kind of stuff.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I love this for Zed. I hate that I'm going to have deal with the
| model providers more directly. Because I don't know what tokens
| are.
|
| It's like if McDonalds changed their pricing model to be some
| complex formula involving nutrition properties (calories, carbs,
| etc) plus some other things (carbon tax, local state taxes,
| whatever) and moved to a pay as you bite model. You start eating
| a Big Mac, but every bite has different content proportions, so
| every bite is changing in price as you go. Only through trial and
| error would you figure out how to eat. And the fact that the
| "complex formula" is prone to real time change at any point,
| makes it impossible to get excited about eating.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I really want to be able to see outline panel, project panel,
| agent panel, and terminal panel all at the same time. If I stay
| at $20/mo, can you guys fix the please?
|
| I'm tired of toggling between them.
| rdtsc wrote:
| I am wondering why they couldn't have foreseen this. Was it
| really a failure to predict the need to charge for tokens
| eventually, or was planned from the start that way -- get people
| to use the unlimited option for a bit, they get hooked, then
| switch them to per-token subscriptions.
| indymike wrote:
| I'm going through this with pricing for our product and the
| battle is:
|
| Customer: wants predictable spend Sales/Marketing: wants an
| amazing product that is easy to sell (read does the mostest for
| the leastest) Advisors: want to see the SaaS model in all it's
| glory (i.e. 85% margin primarily from oversubscription of
| infrastructure) Finance: wants to make money and is really
| worried about variable costs ruining SaaS profit margin
|
| A couple of thoughts:
|
| 1. AI-based cost is mostly variable. Also, things like messaging,
| phone minutes and so on are variable. Cloud expenses are also
| variable... There's a theme and it's different.
|
| 2. The unit of value most ai software is delivering is work that
| is being done by people or should be being done and is not.
|
| 3. Seems like it's time to make friends with a way to make money
| other than subscription pricing.
| nextworddev wrote:
| The first thing they do after getting funded by Sequoia lmao
| marcopolo wrote:
| I'm glad to see this change. I didn't much use the AI features,
| but I did want to support Zed. $20 seemed a bit high for that
| signal. $10 seems right. $5 with no tokens would be nicer.
|
| Great work folks
| hendersoon wrote:
| So they're essentially charging $5/month for unlimited tab
| completions, when you get 2k for free. That seems reasonable,
| many could just not pay anything at all.
|
| But in the paid plan they charge 10% over API prices for metered
| usage... and also support bring your own API. Why would anyone
| pay their +10%, just to be nice?
|
| This is the same problem cursor and windsurf are facing. How the
| heck do you make money when you're competing with cline/roocode
| for users who are by definition technically sophisticated? What
| can you offer that's so wonderful that they can't?
| hit8run wrote:
| Say what you want but Sublime is the GOAT.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| > Additional usage billed at API list price +10%
|
| I'm hoping that zed is someday able to get discount bulk pricing
| to resell through their providers.
|
| With the 10% markup, is there any benefit to using zed's provider
| vs. BYOK?
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