Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there.
Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me work on it.
I then tried opening this 1GB text file to do a simple find/replace on it only to find macOS run out of system memory with Zed quickly using 20gb of memory for that search operation.
I then switched to vscode, which, granted opened it in a buffered sort of way and limited capability, but got the job done.
Maybe that was a me issue I don’t know, but aside from this one-off, it doesn’t have a good extensions support in the community for my needs yet. I hope it gets there!
I feel like Zed stopped working on the editor itself since AI was rolled out. I also wanted it to be the open-source alternative to Sublime, but nothing comes close.
Similar experience: I added a folder to my zed project that was too big, causing zed to lock up and eventually crash. But because the default setting was to re-open projects on launch, I was stuck in a loop where I couldn’t remove the folder either. Eventually found a way to clear the recent projects, load an empty editor, and change the setting to avoid it in the future.
Speaking of aesthetics, I switched back to VSCode but I ended up installing the theme "Zed One Theme" and switched the editor's font to "IBM Plex Mono".
I know it's not Zed, but I am pretty satisfied with the results.
My experience with Zed was that it was a buggy mess with strange defaults. I had high hopes until I tried it but it was not even close to working for my pretty normal use case of coding C so I went back to Sublime.
I think there's still space in the editor market for an open-source Sublime/Zed alternative. I've been working solo on a code editor with similar characteristics for a few years. It's still a work in progress, but it's already feature-rich (all the basics and some advanced features, like LSP, DAP, multi-cursor, etc.): https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode/
ecode can handle big files, though it's not specifically designed for that. I just tested it with the largest text file I could find (760MB), and it worked just fine (searches included). The editor is designed with performance in mind, taking a similar approach to Zed (custom GPU-accelerated renderer, fully native C++ code, heavily multi-threaded, etc.). The biggest challenge is forming a community of collaborators, solo developing such a project in my free time is a huge task. So if anyone is interested, please contact me =)
Token based pricing generally makes a lot of sense for companies like Zed, but it sure does suck for forecasting spend.
Usage pricing on something like aws is pretty easy to figure out. You know what you're going to use, so you just do some simple arithmetic and you've got a pretty accurate idea. Even with serverless it's pretty easy. Tokens are so much harder, especially when using it in a development setting. It's so hard to have any reasonable forecast about how a team will use it, and how many tokens will be consumed.
I'm starting to track my usage with a bit of a breakdown in the hope that I'll find a somewhat reliable trend.
I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud FinOps.
My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the vendor...."the house always wins"
> I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud FinOps.
It already is. There’s been a lot of talk and development around FinOps for AI and the challenges that come with that. For companies, forecasting token usage and AI costs is non-trivial for internal purposes. For external products, what’s the right unit economic? $/token, $/agentic execution, etc? The former is detached from customer value, the latter is hard to track and will have lots of variance.
With how variable output size can be (and input), it’s a tricky space to really get a grasp on at this point in time. It’ll become a solved problem, but right now, it’s the Wild West.
Also seems like a great idea to create a business models where the companies aren't incentivised to provide the best product possible. Instead they'll want to create a product just useful enough to not drive away users, but just useless enough to temp people to go up a tier, "I'm so close, just one more prompt and it will be right this time!"
Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about Zed. I'm talking about the companies make the models.
I agree that tokens are a really hard metric for people. I think most people are used to getting something with a certain amount of capacity per time and dealing with that. If you get a server from AWS, you're getting a certain amount of capacity per time. You still might not know what it's going to cost you to do what you want - you might need more capacity to run your website than you think. But you understand the units that are being billed to you and it can't spiral out of control (assuming you aren't using autoscaling or something).
When you get Claude Code's $20 plan, you get "around 45 messages every 5 hours". I don't really know what that means. Does that mean I get 45 total conversations? Do minor followups count against a message just as much as a long initial prompt? Likewise, I don't know how many messages I'll use in a 5 hour period. However, I do understand when I start bumping up against limits. If I'm using it and start getting limited, I understand that pretty quickly - in the same way that I might understand a processor being slower and having to wait for things.
With tokens, I might blow through a month's worth of tokens in an afternoon. On one hand, it makes more sense to be flexible for users. If I don't use tokens for the first 10 days, they aren't lost. If I don't use Claude for the first 10 days, I don't get 2,160 message credits banked up. Likewise, if I know I'm going on vacation later, I can't use my Claude messages in advance. But it's just a lot easier for humans to understand bumping up against rate limits over a more finite period of time and get an intuition for what they need to budget for.
I'm going through this with pricing for our product and the battle is:
Customer: wants predictable spend
Sales/Marketing: wants an amazing product that is easy to sell (read does the mostest for the leastest)
Advisors: want to see the SaaS model in all it's glory (i.e. 85% margin primarily from oversubscription of infrastructure)
Finance: wants to make money and is really worried about variable costs ruining SaaS profit margin
A couple of thoughts:
1. AI-based cost is mostly variable. Also, things like messaging, phone minutes and so on are variable. Cloud expenses are also variable... There's a theme and it's different.
2. The unit of value most ai software is delivering is work that is being done by people or should be being done and is not.
3. Seems like it's time to make friends with a way to make money other than subscription pricing.
I'm personally looking forward to this change because I currently pay $20/month just to get edit prediction. I use Claude Code in my terminal for everything else. I do wish I could just pay for edit prediction at an even lower price, but I can understand why that's not an option.
I'm curious if they have plans to improve edit prediction though. It's honestly kind of garbage compared to Cursor, and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by calling it garbage. Most of the time it's suggestions aren't helpful, but the 10-20% of the time it is helpful is worth the cost of the subscription for me.
Making this prediction now, LLM pricing will eventually be priced in bytes.
Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different.
Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed. Just like bandwidth. I'm surprised this hasn't already happened.
This whole business model of trying to shave off or arbitrage a fraction of the money going to OpenAI and Anthropic just sucks. And it seems precarious. There's no honest way to resell tokens at a profit, and everyone knows it.
Sorry, how is this new pricing anything but honest? They provide an editor you can use to
- optimize the context you send to the LLM services
- interact with the output that comes out of them
Why does not justify charging a fraction of your spend on the LLM platform? This is pretty much how every service business operates.
For companies where that is their entire business model I absolutely agree. Zed is a solid editor with additional LLM integration features though, so this move would seem to me to just cover their costs + some LLM integration development funds. If their users don't want to use the LLM then no skin off Zed's back unless they've signed some guaranteed usage contract.
>There's no honest way to resell tokens at a profit, and everyone knows it.
Agree with the sentiment, but I do think there are edge cases.
e.g. I could see a place like openrouter getting away with a tiny fractional markup based on the value they provide in the form of having all providers in one place
The whole business model even for OAI/Anthropic is unsustainable.. they are already running it at a huge loss atm, and will do for the foreseeable future. The economics simply doesn't work, unfortunately or not
Good change. I’m not a vibe coder, I use Zed Pro llm integration more like glorified stack overflow. I value Zed more for being an amazing editor for the code I actually write and understand.
I suspect I’m not alone on this. Zed is not the editor for hardcore agentic editing and that’s fine. I will probably save money on this transition while continuing to support this great editor for what it truly shines at: editing source code.
But the reason LLMs aren't used to build features isn't because they are expensive.
The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with, what kind of other components can be extended to support it, (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.
I love this! Finally a more direct way for companies to sponsor open source development. GitHub Sponsors helps, but it is often so vague where the funding is going.
Prediction: the only remaining providers of AI-assisted tools in a few years will be the LLM companies themselves (think claude code, codex, gemini, future xai/Alibaba/etc.), via CLIs + integrations such as ASP.
There is very little value that a company that has to support multiple different providers, such as Cursor, can offer on top of tailored agents (and "unlimited" subscription models) by LLM providers.
I am wondering why they couldn't have foreseen this. Was it really a failure to predict the need to charge for tokens eventually, or was planned from the start that way -- get people to use the unlimited option for a bit, they get hooked, then switch them to per-token subscriptions.
I was just thinking this morning about how I think Zed should rethink their subscription because its a bit pricey if they're going to let you just use Claude Code. I am in the process of trying out Claude and figured just going to them for the subscriptions makes more sense.
I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your devs to look at different code files and discuss them. I might still pay for Zed's subscription in order to support them long term regardless.
I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser?
> I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser?
This is her another reason why CLI-based coding agents will win. Every editor out there trying to be the middle man between you and an AI provider is nuts.
> if they're going to let you just use Claude Code
I'm pretty sure that's only while it's in preview, just like they were giving away model access before that was formally launched. Get it while it's hot.
> Token-agnostic prompt structures obscure the cost and are rife with misaligned incentives
Saying that, token-based pricing has misaligned incentives as well: as the editor developer (charging a margin over the number of tokens) or AI provider, you benefit from more verbose input fed to the LLMs and of course more verbose output from the LLMs.
Not that I'm really surprised by the announcement though, it was somewhat obviously unsustainable
Tokens are an implementation detail that have no business being part of product pricing.
It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value".
When the value customers receive from tokens slips, they pay the same price for the service. But generative AI companies are under no obligation to refund anything, because the customer paid for tokens, and they got tokens in return. Customers have to trust that they're being given the highest quality tokens the provider can generate. I don't have that trust.
Additionally, they have to trust that generative AI companies aren't padding results with superfluous tokens to hit revenue targets. We've all seen how much fluff is in default LLM responses.
Pinky promises don't make for healthy business relationships.
Tokens aren't that much more opaque than RAM GB/s for functions or whatever. You'd have to know the entire infra stack to really understand it. I don't really have a suggestion for a better unit for that kind of stuff.
Doesn’t prompt pricing obfuscate token costs by definition? I guess the alternative is everyone pays $500/mo. (And you’d still get more value than that.)
I completely get why this pricing is needed and it seems fair. There’s a major flaw in the announcement though.
I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not clear:
- Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both?
- What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it varies by model and is “ API list price +10%”, but nowhere does it say what these API list prices are. Am I meant to go to The OpenAI, Anthropic, and other websites to get that pricing information? Shouldn’t that be in a table on that page which each hosted model listed?
—
I’m only a very casual user of AI tools so maybe this is clear to people deep in this world, but it’s not clear to me just based on Zelda pricing page exactly how far $5 per month will get me.
So they're essentially charging $5/month for unlimited tab completions, when you get 2k for free. That seems reasonable, many could just not pay anything at all.
But in the paid plan they charge 10% over API prices for metered usage... and also support bring your own API. Why would anyone pay their +10%, just to be nice?
This is the same problem cursor and windsurf are facing. How the heck do you make money when you're competing with cline/roocode for users who are by definition technically sophisticated? What can you offer that's so wonderful that they can't?
I'm glad to see this change. I didn't much use the AI features, but I did want to support Zed. $20 seemed a bit high for that signal. $10 seems right. $5 with no tokens would be nicer.
seems fine - they're aligning their prices with their costs.
presumably everyone is just aiming or hoping for inference costs to go down so much that they can do a unlimited-with-tos like most home Internet access etc, because this intermediate phase of having to count your pennies to ask the matrix multiplier questions isn't going to be very enjoyable or stable or encourage good companies to succeed.
As a corporate purchaser, "bring your own key" is just about the only way we can allow our employees to stay close to the latest happenings in a rapidly moving corner of the industry.
We need to have a decent amount of trust in the model execution environment and we don't like having tons of variable-cost subscriptions. We have that trust in our corporate-managed OpenAI tenant and have good governance and budget controls there, so BYOK lets us have flexibility to put different frontends in front of our trusted execution environment for different use cases.
[+] [-] hmokiguess|5 months ago|reply
Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me work on it.
I then tried opening this 1GB text file to do a simple find/replace on it only to find macOS run out of system memory with Zed quickly using 20gb of memory for that search operation.
I then switched to vscode, which, granted opened it in a buffered sort of way and limited capability, but got the job done.
Maybe that was a me issue I don’t know, but aside from this one-off, it doesn’t have a good extensions support in the community for my needs yet. I hope it gets there!
[+] [-] klaussilveira|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] laweijfmvo|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mr90210|5 months ago|reply
I know it's not Zed, but I am pretty satisfied with the results.
[+] [-] jeltz|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SpartanJ|5 months ago|reply
ecode can handle big files, though it's not specifically designed for that. I just tested it with the largest text file I could find (760MB), and it worked just fine (searches included). The editor is designed with performance in mind, taking a similar approach to Zed (custom GPU-accelerated renderer, fully native C++ code, heavily multi-threaded, etc.). The biggest challenge is forming a community of collaborators, solo developing such a project in my free time is a huge task. So if anyone is interested, please contact me =)
[+] [-] j_bum|5 months ago|reply
TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.
[+] [-] shafyy|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] indigodaddy|5 months ago|reply
https://github.com/coteditor/CotEditor
[+] [-] razodactyl|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] epolanski|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluehatbrit|5 months ago|reply
Usage pricing on something like aws is pretty easy to figure out. You know what you're going to use, so you just do some simple arithmetic and you've got a pretty accurate idea. Even with serverless it's pretty easy. Tokens are so much harder, especially when using it in a development setting. It's so hard to have any reasonable forecast about how a team will use it, and how many tokens will be consumed.
I'm starting to track my usage with a bit of a breakdown in the hope that I'll find a somewhat reliable trend.
I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud FinOps.
[+] [-] garrickvanburen|5 months ago|reply
https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...
[+] [-] prasoon2211|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Spartan-S63|5 months ago|reply
It already is. There’s been a lot of talk and development around FinOps for AI and the challenges that come with that. For companies, forecasting token usage and AI costs is non-trivial for internal purposes. For external products, what’s the right unit economic? $/token, $/agentic execution, etc? The former is detached from customer value, the latter is hard to track and will have lots of variance.
With how variable output size can be (and input), it’s a tricky space to really get a grasp on at this point in time. It’ll become a solved problem, but right now, it’s the Wild West.
[+] [-] scuff3d|5 months ago|reply
Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about Zed. I'm talking about the companies make the models.
[+] [-] mdasen|5 months ago|reply
When you get Claude Code's $20 plan, you get "around 45 messages every 5 hours". I don't really know what that means. Does that mean I get 45 total conversations? Do minor followups count against a message just as much as a long initial prompt? Likewise, I don't know how many messages I'll use in a 5 hour period. However, I do understand when I start bumping up against limits. If I'm using it and start getting limited, I understand that pretty quickly - in the same way that I might understand a processor being slower and having to wait for things.
With tokens, I might blow through a month's worth of tokens in an afternoon. On one hand, it makes more sense to be flexible for users. If I don't use tokens for the first 10 days, they aren't lost. If I don't use Claude for the first 10 days, I don't get 2,160 message credits banked up. Likewise, if I know I'm going on vacation later, I can't use my Claude messages in advance. But it's just a lot easier for humans to understand bumping up against rate limits over a more finite period of time and get an intuition for what they need to budget for.
[+] [-] jklinger410|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] indymike|5 months ago|reply
Customer: wants predictable spend Sales/Marketing: wants an amazing product that is easy to sell (read does the mostest for the leastest) Advisors: want to see the SaaS model in all it's glory (i.e. 85% margin primarily from oversubscription of infrastructure) Finance: wants to make money and is really worried about variable costs ruining SaaS profit margin
A couple of thoughts:
1. AI-based cost is mostly variable. Also, things like messaging, phone minutes and so on are variable. Cloud expenses are also variable... There's a theme and it's different.
2. The unit of value most ai software is delivering is work that is being done by people or should be being done and is not.
3. Seems like it's time to make friends with a way to make money other than subscription pricing.
[+] [-] genshii|5 months ago|reply
I'm curious if they have plans to improve edit prediction though. It's honestly kind of garbage compared to Cursor, and I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by calling it garbage. Most of the time it's suggestions aren't helpful, but the 10-20% of the time it is helpful is worth the cost of the subscription for me.
[+] [-] dinobones|5 months ago|reply
Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token. Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different.
Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed. Just like bandwidth. I'm surprised this hasn't already happened.
[+] [-] sharkjacobs|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thelastbender12|5 months ago|reply
Why does not justify charging a fraction of your spend on the LLM platform? This is pretty much how every service business operates.
[+] [-] drakythe|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|5 months ago|reply
Agree with the sentiment, but I do think there are edge cases.
e.g. I could see a place like openrouter getting away with a tiny fractional markup based on the value they provide in the form of having all providers in one place
[+] [-] dinvlad|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] WD-42|5 months ago|reply
I suspect I’m not alone on this. Zed is not the editor for hardcore agentic editing and that’s fine. I will probably save money on this transition while continuing to support this great editor for what it truly shines at: editing source code.
[+] [-] prymitive|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 months ago|reply
The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with, what kind of other components can be extended to support it, (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.
[+] [-] ebrescia|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vtail|5 months ago|reply
There is very little value that a company that has to support multiple different providers, such as Cursor, can offer on top of tailored agents (and "unlimited" subscription models) by LLM providers.
[+] [-] rdtsc|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|5 months ago|reply
I think Zed had a lot of good concepts where they could make paid AI benefits optional longer term. I like that you can join your devs to look at different code files and discuss them. I might still pay for Zed's subscription in order to support them long term regardless.
I'm still upset so many hosted models dont just let you use your subscription on things like Zed or JetBrains AI, what's the point of a monthly subscription if I can only use your LLM in a browser?
[+] [-] hamandcheese|5 months ago|reply
This is her another reason why CLI-based coding agents will win. Every editor out there trying to be the middle man between you and an AI provider is nuts.
[+] [-] ibejoeb|5 months ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that's only while it's in preview, just like they were giving away model access before that was formally launched. Get it while it's hot.
[+] [-] VGHN7XDuOXPAzol|5 months ago|reply
Saying that, token-based pricing has misaligned incentives as well: as the editor developer (charging a margin over the number of tokens) or AI provider, you benefit from more verbose input fed to the LLMs and of course more verbose output from the LLMs.
Not that I'm really surprised by the announcement though, it was somewhat obviously unsustainable
[+] [-] acaloiar|5 months ago|reply
It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value".
When the value customers receive from tokens slips, they pay the same price for the service. But generative AI companies are under no obligation to refund anything, because the customer paid for tokens, and they got tokens in return. Customers have to trust that they're being given the highest quality tokens the provider can generate. I don't have that trust.
Additionally, they have to trust that generative AI companies aren't padding results with superfluous tokens to hit revenue targets. We've all seen how much fluff is in default LLM responses.
Pinky promises don't make for healthy business relationships.
[+] [-] ibejoeb|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcwinn|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oakesm9|5 months ago|reply
I get that the pro plan has $5 of tokens and the pricing page says that a token is roughly 3-4 characters. However, it is not clear:
- Are tokens input characters, output characters, or both?
- What does a token cost? I get that the pricing page says it varies by model and is “ API list price +10%”, but nowhere does it say what these API list prices are. Am I meant to go to The OpenAI, Anthropic, and other websites to get that pricing information? Shouldn’t that be in a table on that page which each hosted model listed?
—
I’m only a very casual user of AI tools so maybe this is clear to people deep in this world, but it’s not clear to me just based on Zelda pricing page exactly how far $5 per month will get me.
[+] [-] hendersoon|5 months ago|reply
But in the paid plan they charge 10% over API prices for metered usage... and also support bring your own API. Why would anyone pay their +10%, just to be nice?
This is the same problem cursor and windsurf are facing. How the heck do you make money when you're competing with cline/roocode for users who are by definition technically sophisticated? What can you offer that's so wonderful that they can't?
[+] [-] marcopolo|5 months ago|reply
Great work folks
[+] [-] bitwize|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bananapub|5 months ago|reply
presumably everyone is just aiming or hoping for inference costs to go down so much that they can do a unlimited-with-tos like most home Internet access etc, because this intermediate phase of having to count your pennies to ask the matrix multiplier questions isn't going to be very enjoyable or stable or encourage good companies to succeed.
[+] [-] blutoot|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sethhochberg|5 months ago|reply
As a corporate purchaser, "bring your own key" is just about the only way we can allow our employees to stay close to the latest happenings in a rapidly moving corner of the industry.
We need to have a decent amount of trust in the model execution environment and we don't like having tons of variable-cost subscriptions. We have that trust in our corporate-managed OpenAI tenant and have good governance and budget controls there, so BYOK lets us have flexibility to put different frontends in front of our trusted execution environment for different use cases.