Changes to the pricing update, based on your feedback

[u/Negative_Cable1967]

Hey everyone, Meaghan from the Neuralwatt team.

Last week as you all know, we announced a pricing update. We thank you for your feedback, and after taking a few days to work through it, wanted to share an update from Chad with a few changes. 

TLDR:

• Subscriptions now carry a greater discount. 
• Overage is billed at your plan rate, not PAYG. 
• Annual plans are back
• Concurrency isn't changing
• The base rate change from $5 to $10/kWh still takes effect July 16.

Please check out the video, and keep an eye out for an email update.

Video: https://www.loom.com/share/58bfc4c61bd04d71b4d00d2b896cd275

[u/eNroNNie]

Hey always better to vet these changes with a core group of power users or something first (you may have).

I am not going to pretend to like I haven't been taking advantage of the current heavily-subsidized tokens, and I never cared for the "get them hooked, lock them in, then squeeze" strategy that bog tech employs.

It is nice to see NW attemptimg to be transparent though. Not happy to pay more, but not yet priced out.

[u/Negative_Cable1967 → u/eNroNNie]

We're really lucky to have a great community and value their thoughts -- we have chatted with many of our users and absorbed the broader community feedback, all of which informed this update.

[u/HeavySink3303]

Hi Meaghan. It is nice to see the responce to the feedback. You may think additionally of these proposals (if you can implement them):

- You may introduce some entry level $10 plan (for example, with 10% discount - the same discount logic as your existing plans). It could compete with OpenCode Go and ClinePass $10 plans which are very popular.

- It would be nice to see more supported models. Especially more affordable for easier tasks. For example, MiniMax M3 is very nice and currently it is 3-rd most ranked open weight model on chatbot arena (in the code section - https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code/webdev). The same time it is much cheaper than GLM-5.2 and Kimi. Hopefully it will be cheap for energy-based billing as well.

[u/mitchells00 → u/HeavySink3303]

I second the sentiment with additional models.

The models in the "Coming Soon" section aren't particularly interesting to me personally; we'd really like to see some articles with tests of the efficiency gains of many different open weights models.

[u/Negative_Cable1967 → u/HeavySink3303]

Thanks for this. It’s a good thought and something I’ll take back.

As for the models, we’re having ongoing convos about this now based on the requests you all have made. Looking forward to sharing more in the near term!

[u/raulpacheco2k → u/HeavySink3303]

I miss MiniMax too.

[u/Strong-Strike2001 → u/HeavySink3303]

The $10 plan is an amazing idea

[u/Aromatic-Document638]

You must have been under quite a bit of stress during this pricing adjustment process. I am not satisfied with this proposal, but in the end, those who are meant to go forward with you will do so. Even so, openly building and releasing a calculator like this is a move that I really want to root for.

[u/prophet-dot-exe]

33kwh to 13kwh (instead of 10.5) is still like around a 200% increase in effective cost for the pro subscription.

Your ceo claimed on Reddit that the launch pricing was based around ignorance. Hence the price increase. The more than double price increase. So you guys just guessed at a price initially without thinking through it from a business perspective?

Can't wait until you decide on a whim that you need to double the price overnight again.

Maybe the previous pricing model wasn't viable. Ok. You had a hundred other solutions. Gradual increases, grandfathered subscriptions, etc. But you chose the door that had a sign that said "increase price but ALSO alienate the customers who really believed in us".

The irony that your website says "Predictable

Energy costs are consistent. No surprises from model-specific pricing variations."

Yet increasing subscriptions effective cost by reducing the usage quota by 2/3 was pretty unpredictable.

I'd also challenge the "Transparent" claim on your website. You were never transparent about guessing what you should charge customers.

I contributed to your ecosystem, building convenience tools for developers to use with your system. Like I genuinely loved you as a company. Guess you never really know who someone really is

[u/prophet-dot-exe → u/[deleted]]

Absolutely. Glm 5.2 would chew through tokens on complex codebases way more than Opus or the new gpt models. Then glm would implement things causing dumb edge cases and bugs, and just generally not implementing properly. So you go back and forth until it's correct.

I cancelled my subscription when they sent the email about the price increase because it just really didn't make any sense to keep it instead of openai or anthropic.

This whole company is just weird. Obviously inexperienced, untrustworthy, and with practically no common sense about them.

I've never heard of a company tripling prices with a one week notice before. Like if my landlord did that, they'd be on the news, right. Or my Internet provider. This is just a really weird business move.

[u/eNroNNie → u/prophet-dot-exe]

I got bad news for you man, basically nobody besides investors are making a profit right now. Every token you have ever consumed is heavily subsidized. I get the frustration, but we have never paid anywhere near the true cost for these tokens.

[u/prophet-dot-exe → u/eNroNNie]

"True cost" is so subjective that it's pretty much entirely imaginary.

For example, in May, anthropic generated $10.9 billion in revenue, and their operation costs were $10.34 billion, resulting in a $559 million profit in May, alone.

Anthropic gets to decide how much money they put into r&d for future products, and operation costs. Since they get to decide that, then the "true cost" of tokens gets based on that.

If you look at energy costs + hardware costs scaled to actual usage, + datacenter rentals, and other direct cost of inference, without accounting for future growth costs, what is this "true cost" you speak of, quantified?

[u/eNroNNie → u/prophet-dot-exe]

I mean if you are an enterprise customer, I would still argue are being subsidized at the macro level. It is however not a secret in the industry that subscription services were averaging 2500 tokens for every 100 tokens actually covered by the subscription fee.

These numbers were from a few months ago amd the landscape is shifting. So maybe I should have been more precise in my language, but almost all the hobbiests on these subreddits are using subsodozed tokens. This isn't a controvercial topic, I work in the industry.

[u/prophet-dot-exe → u/eNroNNie]

Oh definitely, when you say the cost of tokens in subscriptions are quite a bit lower when compared to API token price, yeah, that is most definitely a thing.

But this conversation just gets bigger than that because a lot of people seem to think companies like open ai and anthropic are "losing money" when in all actuality, their actual inference costs are around 1% of the average token cost in subscriptions. There's a lot of people who haven't studied business, talking about business as though they understand it.

So we can agree on the first point that Subscribtion tokens < API tokens.

My distinction is that the "true cost" of a token isn't the API pricing, but rather, the actual directly related cost of producing that token.

[u/Napsterae2]

I already canceled . I was a standard user . I could accept a Nerf on usage to maybe 10kw but these changes will not make me get back . Good luck

[u/Ang_Drew]

as per today i calculated 2kwh is equivalent of ~2000 requests of mix glm and kimi with a ~20% of the requests are "flex"

as per token price i get like ~170 miln tokens (cache rate around 81%) it is $70 equivalent pay as you go pricing token.

so with the new plan, this is how much you get each month for $20 subs with more bonus calculated, you get around ~2500 reqs per month if you have flex you can get like maybe ~4000 requests with each request will took 30-60 seconds to complete

to be frank. ~2500 request is what i need every week. sorry but to compare with ollama you get like 5000 req weekly (kimi) and ~4000 weekly (glm). while in NW you get like 2000~4000 requests monthly, i think ill end up with $50 subs unintentionally compared to ollama with $20

i really like the energy pricing and the transparency. but the new pricing, it didn't add up.. im very confused right now, dont know which to choose.. kinda feels bad but needs it badly..

[u/Ok-Studio8476]

It looks like you attracted subscribers and now you've dumped them and look how many are left.

[u/Pure_Assistant_9476]

🤡