---
title: "Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/are-you-willing-to-pay-100k-a-year-per-developer-on-ai--eaffyutbj
source_url: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/are_you_willing_to_pay/
type: article
source: "The Register"
published: 2025-08-15T11:03:41.796Z
updated: 2025-08-15T11:04:05.355Z
tags: ["ai", "github", "openai"]
reading_time: 6
upvotes: 50
comments: 13
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
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# Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

**[The Register](https://daily.dev/sources/theregister)** · 6 min read · 50 upvotes · 13 comments

## Summary

AI companies are currently selling their services at loss leader prices, but this won't last forever. While tools like GitHub Copilot claim to write 30% of code, many developers don't trust AI results and spend significant time fixing AI-generated errors. Current AI pricing of $20-200 per month per developer could increase 10-15 times when companies like OpenAI (burning $8 billion annually) need to become profitable. The real implementation costs often run double or triple initial estimates, making AI adoption far more expensive than anticipated.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/are_you_willing_to_pay/>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@eugeneyaremenko** · 6 upvotes

> [Claude code lately generates total garbage to the point that I'm not sure if it even saves me any time or effort.  ](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/4639)

**@ezpie** · 4 upvotes

> so basically what we devs predicted would happen is happening? How am I not surprised? Because we are the masters of our field! People who are unfamiliar with a field are easily fooled in that field so I guess the masters won... again :hand-on-head:

**@asmundur** · 3 upvotes

> While this article raises valid concerns about per‑developer AI costs, it overlooks a crucial trend: performance gains from successive model generations, such as GPT‑5, are plateauing. However, inference cost reduction continues to improve markedly. For instance, the new Avengers‑Pro routing system sustains or even boosts accuracy compared to GPT‑5‑medium while reducing costs by up to 27%, or achieving 90% of performance at 63% lower cost. Moreover, OpenAI has implemented data innovations that cut inference costs by approximately 75%. This sustained drop in inference cost undercuts the...

**@thebabyprogrammer** · 1 upvotes

> before AI the title would have been "Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on Google?"

**@deentap** · 0 upvotes

> There’s no other way, were going there anyway

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---

Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#github](https://daily.dev/tags/github), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/are-you-willing-to-pay-100k-a-year-per-developer-on-ai--eaffyutbj)