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by mrweasel4 hours ago |
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upvoteby fauigerzigerk3 hours ago|
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I can think of a few other reasons:

- Not everyone uses dollars.

- The price of credits in some currency could change after you bought them.

- The price of credits could be different for different customers (commercial, educational, partners, etc)

- They can ban trading of credits or let them expire

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upvoteby hmry4 hours ago|
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Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature
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upvoteby toddmorey4 hours ago|
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You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money.

And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.

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upvoteby OptionOfT2 hours ago|
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I refuse to play games where you pay real money for consumables.
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upvoteby philipallstar1 hours ago|
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Board games do not have this problem.
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upvoteby devmor3 hours ago|
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I hate that pattern so much. It’s also not just to obfuscate the spending - it’s also to ensure you already have some amount left over in your account, so that it feels like you’re not spending as much to just “top up” and afford that one thing you want this time.

If you have some left over that you can’t spend, it feels like you’ve “wasted” them.

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upvoteby SlinkyOnStairs3 hours ago|
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A fundamental architectural problem is that they genuinely do not know what a query will cost ahead of time.

Even for a single standalone LLM that's the case, and the 'agentic' layers thrown on top just make that problem exponentially worse.

One'd need to entirely switch away from LLMs to fix this problem.

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upvoteby babyshake3 hours ago|
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Isn't this an orthogonal issue that doesn't affect whether billing is done with credits or money?
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upvoteby zozbot2341 hours ago|
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If the expensive parts of the query happen to work iteratively (especially if agentic), you can act on those loops to bound the cost. Even if it's pure forward generation, you could pause an expensive inference and continue it seamlessly with a cheaper model, adding little to the cost.
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upvoteby tatrions2 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby predkambrij2 hours ago|
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Taximeter effect
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upvoteby LeafItAlone3 hours ago|
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What is snarky about that?

The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers.

Is there anything wrong with that?

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upvoteby 2 hours ago|
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deleted
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