Yet another Hacker News

Apple capped engineers at a $200 daily AI budget

47 points GloVin 1 hour ago 40 comments

Someone 51 minutes ago | parent

FTA (emphasis added: Apple has reportedly slashed the daily AI spending limit for SOME of its own engineers, dropping the cap from $300 down to $200

changoplatanero 35 minutes ago | parent

$200 a day is not that bad. probably more than the majority of companies?

klodolph 32 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, my cap is higher but I don’t use it.

sky2224 4 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, mine is $500/mo currently, but I have the ability to request more if I can justify it.

thewhitetulip 34 minutes ago | parent

$ 200 a month and yet new releases of Mac are not upto the mark. Very strange

neevans 30 minutes ago | parent

$200 a day

uvu 29 minutes ago | parent

$ 200 daily, not month.

vedanshchauhan9 33 minutes ago | parent

I use claude code $20 plan for the whole month, $200 is a whole year of that.

solyin 31 minutes ago | parent

Enterprises don't get to pay that plan. That's the consumer option. Businesses pay extra.

pixlmint 26 minutes ago | parent

My "AI subscription" is just buying 20$ openrouter credits when I run out and it's costing me less every month then a monthly Claude subscription. 200$ a day is insane

yokaze 17 minutes ago | parent

Your data is likely kept and used for training models.

For most businesses, that's a no go. At least at the company I work for, we have to wait for new models because they negotiate away the training and retention and the vendors are not too eager to give up their moat.

That's their moat: your data.

nxpnsv 7 minutes ago | parent

Factually incorrect https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr

anilakar 9 minutes ago | parent

As long as you have under 150 users you can get the cheaper 25 dollar per seat plan.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 25 minutes ago | parent

Oh… my sweet summer child. Hang onto that non-enterprise pricing for as long as you can.

fbrncci 10 minutes ago | parent

But if you got access to all the latest models, through your org, without limits to spend, you'd likely not stay at $20 for even a day.

Foobar8568 9 minutes ago | parent

Good for you but $20 is too limited, a review of a code base and it’s gone.

throwuxiytayq 29 minutes ago | parent

So that’s a yearly budget cut from $110k down to $73k, correct? I could live with that. I’d have a hard time finding ways to burn all these tokens.

zeroonetwothree 25 minutes ago | parent

If you work 365 days a year which hopefully you don’t…

boredatoms 25 minutes ago | parent

Presumably they mean work days rather than all days of the year

80fj0348i 15 minutes ago | parent

How many engineers at Apple are on-call?

heinternets 27 minutes ago | parent

That's a lot of tokens. I burn Opus about half the day and reach maybe half of that at most.

cmckn 19 minutes ago | parent

So if you burned Opus the whole day…

mrdw 22 minutes ago | parent

If $200 in API price equivalent it's too low. That's less than Claude Max x5 plan gives. So with $100 plan you'd have more tokens than apple engineer

odo1242 20 minutes ago | parent

Apple is paying API prices, not subscription prices, though. $6000/month is half the engineer's monthly salary, it seems ridiculous to say that won't be enough, unless you're being very inefficient with token spend.

muro 14 minutes ago | parent

I think engineers in the Bay area are paid more than 12k / month. Maybe it's 1/3 of their salary :)

MattRix 14 minutes ago | parent

The fact that it's expensive has nothing to do with how useful it is though... I know plenty of people who max out their $200 plans every week, and they are working on stuff a lot less financially valuable than what Apple employees work on.

recursive 8 minutes ago | parent

I know people who spend that on lottery tickets. Obviously rational.

onion2k 15 minutes ago | parent

It's only too low if the goal is to use AI as much as possible. If Apple are saying their engineers should not use AI for everything, and that they should still be working as they did but with a small assist from AI, the budget makes a lot of sense.

Giving people some constraints so they have to actually think about solving their problems properly rather than just throwing money (or tokens) at it is not a bad idea.

htfy96 7 minutes ago | parent

It's kinda borderline. My dev workflow in my full-time job (Opus 5.5, 5 concurrent worktrees with human checking results and giving instructions) spend exactly $200/day on average. I imagine it could be more friendly if it's $300, as otherwise I might have to move some of my AI usage to weekends, which implicitly increases working hours :[

siva7 21 minutes ago | parent

what's the source? ok i know everything is nowadays ai generated but come on?

stonecharioteer 21 minutes ago | parent

I'm curious, what laptops do apple engineers get and are they encouraged to try local LLMs?

measurablefunc 20 minutes ago | parent

So they are paying approximately $6k/engineer-month.

jakegmaths 12 minutes ago | parent

That's a maximum/cap, not an average.

80fj0348i 18 minutes ago | parent

$5600 per 28-day period is quite a lot!