Grad students are incredibly cheap? In the UK for instance their stipend is £20,780 a year...

These sort of transparent answers are what make oxide and the people behind it such a fantastic company. Thank you for your wonderful contributions to the software and hardware community!

The usage limits on most 20 USD/month subs are becoming quite restrictive though. API pricing is more indicative of true cost.

It's not even that. It's way easier to do R&D when you don't have a customer base to support.

I think your forgetting that governments can just shut a company down, or even worse completely take it over and nationalise it. At the end of the day sovereigns rule over all else. Money means nothing when a gun is pointed at your head.

Whilst I won't comment on this specific person, one of the best programmers I've met has a law degree, so I wouldn't use their degree against them. People can have many interests and skills.

People do do it, but unless you work for a company you won't hear about their internal tools or products since they aren't selling them.

Yeh but in a company of 100 employees for software of 30k a year, it's more than worth it to take your standard 50k (GBP) dev and have them replaced it. It's a one time cost, and the support time will certainly be less than 50% of their time every year so it saves money.

There are many companies that operate like this all over the world. Outside of the hyper-growth tech VC world cutting costs is a very real target and given how cheap Devs are outside of America it's almost always worth it.

$30k/year? For 100 Employees. So - $25/seat?

I can't imagine it would ever be worth, under any scenario, trying to write/build/support any $25/seat SaaS software for any company I've worked at in 25+ years.

Another thing to keep in mind - very little of the cost of a SaaS license is the time it takes to build the software. Security, Support, Maintenance, Administration, backups/restores, testing/auditing said backups/restores, etc, etc.. and then x-training new SREs on how to support/manage this software, ...

Even as someone who spend 10+ hours a day churning out endless LLM applications, products, architectures from my myriad of Cursor/Codex/CC interfaces and agents - I'm dubious that LLMs will ever eat into SaaS revenue.

I'm sure (lots of) people will try - and then 1-2 years in someone will look at the pain, and just pull the ripcord.

no. High interest rates and a cautionary view of future economic growth are killing B2B SaaS. Money is no longer free, and so there is a bigger push for cost-cutting rather than growing your buisness with free money.

I was skepitcal upon hearing the figure but various sources do indeed back it up and [0] is a pretty interesting paper (old but still relevant human transcibers haven't changed in accuracy).

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I think it's actually hard to verify how correct a transcription is, at scale. Curious where those error rate numbers come from, because they should test it on people actually doing their job.