Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based

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.

VSCode is my go to for large text file interaction on macOS.

TextEdit may be worth looking into as well? Haven’t tested it for large files before.

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 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"

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

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 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.

This is partially why, at least for LLM-assisted coding workloads, orgs are going with the $200 / mo Claude Code plans and similar.

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.

Token based pricing works for the company, but not for the user.

The problem is that tokens don't all equate to the same size. A megabyte of some random json is a LOT more tokens than a megabyte of "Moby Dick".

> Why: LLMs are increasingly becoming multimodal, so an image "token" or video "token" is not as simple as a text token.

For autoregressive token-based multimodal models, image tokens are as straightforward as text tokens, and there is no reason video tokens wouldn’t also be. (If models also switch architecture and multimodal diffusion models, say, become more common, then, sure, a different pricing model more tied to actual compute cost drivers for that architecture are likely but... even that isn’t likely to be bytes.)

> Also, it's difficult to compare across competitors because tokenization is different.

That’s a reason for incumbents to prefer not to switch, though, not a reason for them to switch.

> Eventually prices will just be in $/Mb of data processed.

More likely they would be in floatint point operations expended processing them, but using tokens (which are the primary drivers for the current LLM architectures) will probably continue as long as the architecture itself is doninant.

No one is going to give up token-based pricing. The main players can twiddle their models to make anything any amount of tokens they choose.

Hm... why not tokens as reported by each LLM provider? They already handle pricing for images etc.

Why this instead of cpu/gpu time?

I have never used Zed predictions but $20 for 500 prompts is quite a good deal. I use it mostly with Opus for some hard cases.

We have a significant investment underway in edit predictions. We hear you, more soon.

That's been my workflow also. Claude Code / OpenAI Codex most of the time, when I have to edit files Cursor's auto-complete is totally worth the $20.

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

If you look at even the Claude/OpenAI chat UIs, they kind of suck. Not sure why you think someone else can't/won't do it better. Yes, the big players will copy what they can, but they also need to chase insane growth and getting every human on earth paying for an LLM subscription.

A tool that is good for everyone is great for no one.

Also, I think we're seeing the limits on "value" of a chat interface already. Now they're all chasing developers since there's a real potential to improve productivity (or sadly cut-costs) there. But even that is proving difficult.

I recently started using Codex (OpenAI's Claude Code) and it has a VSCode extension that works like a charm. I tried out Windsurf a while ago. And the Codex extension simply does everything that Windsurf did. I guess it doesn't show changes at well, (it shows diffs in it's own window instead of in the file), but I can just check a git diff graphically (current state vs. HEAD) if I really wanted that.

I am really tempted to buy ChatGPT Pro, and probably would have if I lived in a richer country (unfortunetley purchase power parity doesn't equalize for tech products). The problem with Windsurf (and presumably Cursor and others) is that you buy the IDE subscription and then still have to worry about usage costs. With Codex/Claude Code etc., yeah, it's expensive, but, as long as you're within the usage limits, which are hopefully reasonable for the most expensive prices, you don't have to worry about it. AND you get the web and phone apps with GPT 5 Pro, etc.

I don't know. Foundation models are very good, and you can get a surprising amount of mileage from them by using them with low level interfaces. But personally I think companies building development tools of the future will use LLMs to build systems with increasing capabilities. I think a lot of engineering challenges remain in scaling LLM's to take over day to day in programming, and the current tools are scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine LLMs with traditional systems engineering.

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.

> 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.

List here: https://zed.dev/docs/ai/models. Thanks for the feedback, we'll make sure this is linked from the pricing page. Think it got lost in the launch shuffle.