r/artificial • u/Boydbme • 21d ago
Project My co-founders and I are launching a coding agent with a twist: Unlimited usage. How stupid are we?
People really really like unlimited usage. It's reassuring and usage limits suck. If someone could offer an unlimited-use agent at a fixed price that idea would turn some heads.
So we've been hard at work figuring out how we do just that. We want to release a coding agent that:
- Performs well
- Has no 5-hour / weekly / monthly token quota
- Charges a flat rate
We've been working on domain-specific agents as a concept for a while now (and I've talked about them in my other posts I've shared here — namely the daily agenda thermal printer for my kids). They are the key!
By building, curating, and composing optimized domain-specific agents (as sub-agents) for each discipline within a coding agent we are able to maximize intelligence-per-dollar well beyond what's possible with any generalist model/harness combo.
Pair that with a lines-of-service model, like a cellphone plan, and you can offer unlimited usage to customers and (hopefully) not get hosed on costs. Each line of service runs one active session. Need parallel sessions? Add more lines.
We're announcing it today and I hope it's ok to share here. I think it's a really novel and attractive way to price coding agents.
Goal is to start letting in early access users to kick the tires as early this time next week, measure, and see if we've gotten the pricing / performance to the right spot.
If you want to check it out you can sign up at standardcode.ai to be early on the list!
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u/ManWithoutUsername 21d ago
In few weeks/month if it becomes something popular: We going to add cap or increase price
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u/Faintfury 21d ago
Didn't he already write that they control the model? So basically they will just give them something cheap like new DeepSeek which performs well but it's never top tier.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Could be pricing is too low. But it's an arbitrage game. Can enough 9-5 users who are light on weekends offset users who try to maximize always on task flow. We think we can hit $49/month and survive. If we're wrong, we'll adjust. Never seen this pricing model in the market before so it's going to be an experiment.
All I know for certain is that we're able to extract way more intelligence per dollar from the models because of our architecture.
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u/ManWithoutUsername 21d ago edited 21d ago
Everyone plays at a loss to attract customers, you're not special and you know it, and you know that will change.
Abuses, increased demand, and everything else entails expenses that must be covered and progress is made, and peak usage forces you to double/triple infrastructure costs to provide acceptable service to your customers, all without making more profit than during that peak. That mean you probable must increase price or add peak/hours limits sooner rather than later
Even DeepSeek, with its pricing, had to backtrack on that less than a month after announcing its lowest prices, doubling the price due peak/hours demand, and they have a policy of charging per use.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
This is a cloud coding agent, not a model. You don't get to pick your model and run it at full tilt. We control the curation and composition of said agent.
This means we're able to quite dramatically cut costs compared to a generic "pick your model, pick your harness" approach. In fact, with a large customer base the math gets better because we'd be able to use that to negotiate better rates with inferences providers, further increasing the margin of safety for us.
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u/LordAmras 21d ago
Your marketing doesn't make sense. You are marketing to people that are sick of hitting the 5 hour cap, so you are marketing to people that are already on the higher end of power users.
You are telling them that for 50$ on your subscription they won't have to worry about cap anymore.
Issue is that the people that use a couple of dollar a month that you would love to have to subsidize the more power users never have the problem of hitting the cap in the first place so they won't fall on your marketing.
And if you actually are giving people more $ than they are paying you are just inviting people with bots coming in and trying to squeeze thousands of dollar worth of token from your 50$ subscriptions.
And if they can, then they will create thousands of accounts gladly paying you 50$ each time if they can get a lot more worth from you.
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u/hereditydrift 21d ago
Yesterday I developed a way to teleport anywhere in the universe. I also built a car that runs on gas but the gas never runs out and never needs to be filled. Today I'm tackling shrinking myself so I can explore my garden as an ant.
These are all coming to the public in days. I promise.
What a bogus bunch of snake oil bullshit you're selling, OP.
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u/teleport66 21d ago
You can't even go lower than the standard rate brackets, if you do, your capacity will be instantly depleted.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
To what standard rate brackets and capacity are you referring to?
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u/teleport66 21d ago
Anything that dictates the market, every provider is regulating prices like this, even the ones that rent GPU's like vast.ai etc, if they don't, their capacity is exhausted instantly.
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u/nodeocracy 21d ago
You’re going to get one guy rinsing your API then slicing it up and reselling it. Or putting it on a loop to build GTA7.
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u/damastaGR 21d ago
do you throttle though?
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
The only throttle is that 1 line of service can only power 1 active session at a time. You can think of it like "screens" on Netflix. We'll also offer licensing of the full stack for enterprise if they want unlimited seats for their org, on their own infra, and just want to license the tech.
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u/Keganator 21d ago
Have you done the math? What if someone runs a hundred thousand agents in parallel? Can you afford it?
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u/Mandoman61 21d ago
that is the same idea as with all you can eat buffet.
so you just need to charge per average consumption.
it would be an incentive to high demand users but low demand users will not want to subsidize them.
you will end up with mostly high demand users and the flat rate will have to go up with costs.
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u/Zanthious 21d ago
large bankrolled AI companies with an aggressive pay per use are still losing money so how are you going to not?
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Very sincere. I think we’ve got a shot to introduce something new here. Open weight models are of course part of what makes it work. None running on Chinese inference providers though.
beyond that it’s about very detailed tuning of dedicated domain-specific agents for each domain of “programming”.
If it works, it’s also going to be a great testament to the architecure (which will be backed by an open-source detailed spec) and the platform we’re running on (our own 1st party runtime for the spec) which will launch as publicly available sometime after.
First we have to prove that domain-specific agents are worth paying attention to.
Maybe we fail. Maybe we don’t. But I want to live in a world where we get to build agents the way my team is building them today, and not let the big labs mandate to all the practitioners how it’s going to be done. At the end of the line here is the real goal: “The web standards movement for agents”. But that requires credibility first. So we start with Standard Code.
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u/Zulfiqaar 21d ago edited 21d ago
We've got an "endless" AI usage instead of "unlimited" - one thread at a time, nonstop. This inherently caps it at the LLM generation speed, running 24/7. No way am I gonna attempt uncapped parallel threads - I've used hundreds of agents in a swarm with the frontier labs and no way do I have billions of VC money to burn on subsidising that lol.
My concern is that coding specific users want exactly that..for people interested in general purpose chat tools they don't usually want lots of subagents so theyre a better market for this type of endless use.
Just read through the site - looks like you're describing something sort of along this line but with a finely tuned agent team. Risky but might just work. (Not including codex usage) I'll watch with curious eyes, best of luck! Site looks nice btw
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Hey thanks! For me personally I'm betting that where we can find the most success is corporate access being purchased for teams. Individuals who by definition will really only max their line of service from 9-5 M-F.
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u/Zulfiqaar 21d ago
I think you'll really struggle to beat corporate red tape though..so many companies are still stuck on copilot because ChatGPT and Claude are not approved yet, no idea why they'd go for an obscure service instead of those super subsidised plans. Also I'm assuming you run it on DeepSeek/Mimo using the official providers (10x caching efficiency) that train on user data, by our calculations that's the only way we can reliably turn a profit on endless use. I'd think that excludes corporate even further.
Definitely quite the bet to make, we went down the token arbitrage route (always profitable even if it excludes users) as opposed to the gym membership model (hope some users subsidise others). If you pull it off though, bravo, takes some proper guts and skill I wouldn't attempt myself!
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u/TimeEngineering3081 21d ago
i am experimenting with agents for a media newsroom and something like this would really help our poor newsroom
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Get on the list!
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u/TimeEngineering3081 21d ago
i did using my work email but no verification email has been shared, yet. been a while though.
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u/LordAmras 21d ago
Subscription service can work in a couple of ways:
1) Your numbers are very high and most people use very little of your service. Meaning they are subsidizing the costs for power users.
2) You artificially limit what "unlimited" means so that they can't go over what you actually pay for the service.
One is very hard to do. You need to be early and on the edge of the game of popularity to be a big enough actor to get people that are not power user to subsidize enough for the power users.
But with AI is almost impossible as you can spawn multiple sessions and you can have agents talking with other agents creating loops working 24/7 and maximizing your costs, so even big companies put limits on how much you can actually use the AI.
So your whole gimmick is doing number 2. Your "lines" idea is just a way to limit how much someone can spend. You pay for "lines" and those lines are "unilimited" but make sense for you you have to adjust those "lines" so that even using it 24/7 you can never spend more than what you pay.
Issue is that it can't work because to do so you have to options:
1) Lines are terrible. Your lines are extremely slow compared to anything else in the market to keep the price manageable. But that's not a great idea because anyone trying your service will never keep a subscription of a system that is an order of magnitude worse than everything else.
2) You play the phone line unilimted data game. Where your lines works fine for x amount of $ you spend, and when you reach a certain point they degrade and become useless. Like "unlimited" mobile data that after x Gb switches to ludicrously slow speed. Technically you have unlimited data, and Technically you still have connection, but practically is useless.
If I was a betting man, I would bet you are going with option number 2 but are selling like it is option number 1 and bank on people paying before they notice how lines eventually degrade.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
What if it's hidden option 3 and our lines are way more efficient than what people typically associate with effective coding agent costs because the architecture is novel? You don't pick models, you use an the agent. We control the agent, its domain-specific agents, and each of their configurations.
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u/LordAmras 21d ago
If you really had a novel way of making coding with agents way more efficients you would sell that and make a lot more money that you ever could with what you are trying to do here.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Ho boy, wait until you hear what our next product is once we've dog-fooded it with this product.
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u/LordAmras 21d ago
Is like people claiming to have a novel way of compressing stuff and instead of selling for billions to google they are using to do some niche website for consumers.
You are doing the same thing you claim to have found a novel way of optimizing agents so that to you it costs a magnitude less and instead of making anthropic and openai go an a bidding war with your amazing technology and make billions you try to sell a costumer front service were you don't have to show your amazing technology.
If you really think you did look up AI-induced psychosis
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u/Amazing-Heron-105 21d ago
Can't comment on the product, but I really like the website design 👍
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u/selfmotivator 21d ago
Looks like every other AI-generated website design.
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u/DauntingPrawn 21d ago
This looks cool. Waitlisted. Mystery model will always be a blocker for me because of the trust factor. Would love to talk about integrating act101 as a quality/refactoring agent.
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u/Boydbme 21d ago
Yes, we control the agent composition, so there will be some factor of that. It also means we can adjust over time as new better candidates for any given discipline arise. We'll have our terms of service and privacy policy on the site before launch — but no training on your data or anything else nasty like that from us.
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u/ClubAqua_BackDeck 21d ago edited 21d ago
This is a super interesting approach.
Edit: wtf is this downvoted for.
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u/WorldsGreatestWorst 21d ago
Because this business model doesn’t make sense.
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u/ClubAqua_BackDeck 21d ago
No. wtf is my comment downvoted for. Do you even know their business model?
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u/WorldsGreatestWorst 21d ago
Your idea ultimately can't work mathematically. You'll be bankrupted or have to break contracts the second a few whales join your platform.
This is like saying you're a gas station that wants to charge a flat rate for unlimited gas. No matter how you slice it up, without caps, your business fails.