Performance Vs Cost in AI Products
Importance: 3 | # | ai-engg, ai-tools
near:
The reason it's so expensive to chat with Auren + Seren is because we made the opposite trade-off that every other 'AI chat app' (which i dont classify Auren as) made.
most of them try to reduce costs until a convo costs e.g. $0.001
we did the opposite, i.e. "if we are willing to spend as much as we want on each user, how good can we make their experience?"
the downside is that the subscription is $20/month and increases past this for power-users
but the upside is that users get an experience far better than they anticipated and which is far more fun, interesting, and helpful than any similar experience, especially after they give it a few days to build up memory
this is a similar trade-off made for products like claude code and deep research, both of which I also use daily
for some reason no one else has made this trade-off for an app which focuses on helping people think, process emotions, make life choices, and improve themselves, so that was a large motivation behind Auren
we have single users which have cost >$100 in inference spend already after being out for just a few weeks, but it seems like the right choice thus far hearing how much people love it
...
one corollary of this is that if you're looking for a product idea, this exists in every single vertical, even niche markets. and for a lot of ideas you don't have to train your own models.
for example, we know gpt-4o-image has a lot of useful features, right?
imagine you made a wrapper for this which took what the user wants, automatically made 20 different variations, showed them to the user, let them click their favorite one, then made 20 variations of THAT, and then you upscale it or do something fancy or whatever at the end.
the user has only had to make two clicks, but you have probably saved them 30 minutes of ChaGPT usage.
this is a product I'd actually pay for, right now. and i'd pay more than what I pay ChatGPT!
the LLMs are getting cheaper, and this means you should use MORE of them, not less!