[mrbungie]

> full featured f/oss alternatives.

Assuming this comes from lower barriers of entry to software engineering skills at scale with LLMs, this is still begs the question: Who will pay for the tokens? One thing is giving away your free time for passion, other one is giving away money.

Maybe we'll see a future were people crowdsource projects supporting them directly via donations for tokens/LLM queries.

[sneak]

Tokens aren’t that expensive.

I built a CapRover clone that’s actually free software for <$1k. I imagine it wouldn’t be much more to modify a fork of Mattermost to add in their pay-gated features like SSO and message expiry etc.

[monkeydust]

> people crowdsource projects supporting them directly via donations for tokens/LLM queries.

Is this perhaps happening today? Large open source projects where llm could deliver the code.. e.g. I want an home assistant to connect to something that perhaps isn't mainstream but used by a dozen users. Those dozen users fund the PR via token budget?

[3uler]

Do you not value your time? Paying a 100 bucks for a Claude max subscription is well worth it

[mrbungie]

Opportunity costs: Would you rather pay 100 bucks for making more money or for your foss projects?

The same can be said of your time, but here we're talking about scale benefits due to LLMs (i.e. lots of SaaSs dying due to lots of "full featured f/oss projects").