Response to Max Mleiter, Pricing For The People

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This is comical at best. “The median message on v0 today cost $.08” this statement is absolutely laughable and completely disconnected from reality. I haven’t had a single chat under 20 cents EVER since this pricing change rolled out. In fact, I’ve had multiple chats escalate to 8-9 dollars for a SINGLE chat. This response is not just hilarious, it’s downright insulting to those of us actually using the platform and experiencing these costs firsthand.

The fundamental issue here isn’t just the pricing model itself it’s the complete lack of transparency and predictability within the platform. If you could actually stay within your projected message prices and deliver what you promise a working v0, this might be a decent change. But right now, the pricing is completely unpredictable, wildly inconsistent, and honestly terrible from a user experience standpoint but not just as a lone developer but as a company team. I’ve supported switching to chat based pricing but this transition is simply terrible.

I’ve attached screenshots showing my actual usage of v0, where I’m getting hit with errors that are costing me $8 per chat. But it gets worse - the system is charging me TWICE for single conversations. That means I’m paying $16 for what should be one single chat, not a fork a CHAT, often attempting bug fixes within my website that don’t even work properly. This isn’t just poor pricing, it’s broken functionality that’s bleeding users dry and causing them to leave for a good reason.

Your comparison to competitors charging $.25+ per message is misleading when your actual costs are hitting users at 0.30-$7 per interaction. At least with flat-rate competitors, I know what I’m paying upfront. With v0’s current system, every click feels like spinning a roulette wheel with my company credit card.

The “transparency” you’re touting is non-existent when users can’t predict costs, can’t track usage effectively during conversations, and are getting charged multiple times for the same interactions. You mention shipping fixes for bugs and issues, but these bugs are costing real money from real users who are essentially paying to beta test your platform.

The community response you’re replying to makes excellent points about compensation and trial periods for affected users. The transition wasn’t just handled poorly it was a outright disaster that shifted all the financial risk and technical failures onto paying customers. When your platform fails, crashes, generates empty responses, or duplicates chats, users shouldn’t be footing the bill for your technical issues.

What makes this even more frustrating is how the pricing balloons as v0 goes through its “thinking” process. You can literally watch your credits drain in real-time as the system churns through iterations, revisions, and internal processing that you have zero control over. The AI might decide to completely rewrite code multiple times, generate extensive internal reasoning, or get stuck in loops - and you’re paying for every single token of that background processing. This means a simple request can spiral into massive costs not because of the complexity of your ask, but because of how inefficiently the system decides to handle it internally. You’re essentially paying premium prices for the privilege of funding v0’s computational inefficiencies.

Until you can deliver consistent, predictable pricing that actually matches your claimed medians, and until you stop charging users for your platform’s technical failures, this pricing model remains fundamentally broken and user-hostile.

This was tested on May 28 2025, on Lg and Md

Screenshot 2025-05-28 at 10.16.46 AM
Screenshot 2025-05-28 at 10.16.46 AM1970×428 43.3 KB

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so he copy pased same PR stript all the others keep repeating how sad

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It definitely does not address how they aim to regain trust to those affected by the poor transition, regardless of the pricing change.

This transition was met by credit consumption caused by v0’s own doing, there are plenty of good will gestures they could offer out right now but it seems theyd rather get rid of the very community that aided to the chatbot, crafting ideas that curated errors that would not have been found without the already paying community.

We truely are lost leaders, we challenged the AI with our ideas and countless hours , we supported the project with our hard earnt money (i speak universally as my tenure is short) and all the community gets is another lack luster response that only adds fuel to the fire.

We respect the ongoing costs , but your execution speaks volumes.

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Absolutely. V0 needs to implement meaningful changes to rebuild user trust. This pricing model is a far cry from what early adopters originally committed to, and while some users have stayed loyal, many others have already jumped ship to loveable and cursor.

They’re hemorrhaging their user base, and unless they start genuinely addressing these concerns instead of rolling out the same old PR responses, the tension between users and Vercel is only going to accelerate. People can see through generic corporate speak, What most users want is acknowledgment of the problem and concrete steps toward a solution.

The community that helped build V0 into what it is today deserves better than being brushed off with template responses. If they don’t course-correct soon, they’ll find themselves with a much smaller, less engaged user base that won’t be nearly as forgiving the next time they make changes.

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I’m sorry to hear you’re struggling with v0 and the update pricing model. We’re doing our best to answer everyone. But there are a lot of posts to read through so I’ll admit we have repeated the same response more than once.

The existence of outliers does not negate the facts. The median cost for all messages on v0 is $0.08 based on the metrics I’ve seen. But there are definitely cases where the cost is much lower or higher than that.

The large model will use more resources and cost more as a result. The small model we’re releasing soon will use less resources and cost much less as a result. I hope that makes sense.

We don’t want to charge for v0 mistakes. We really don’t want it even to make mistakes in the first place. So we need a way to reliably detect and handle them. It helps us if you report issues you see on the platform so the team has the data they need to build tools for that.

The team has made improvements based on that customer feedback, and they’ll continue to do so. Whenever you run into a problem with v0 output, please report it.

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Amy, I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and I’m glad you acknowledge that you’ve been giving repeated responses that’s exactly the issue we’re highlighting.

Regarding the $0.08 median cost, that’s cherry picking data. Yes, some simple requests might cost that little, but anyone doing actual development work knows the costs add up fast. When you’re iterating on a project, debugging, or working through complex problems, you can easily hit dozens of interactions in a session. That $0.08 becomes $5-10+ per development session real quick. And with Lg can total to over 100’s of dollars per session if these $7-8 dollar costs are true.

The comparison to competitors charging $0.25+ per message isn’t fair either those are typically enterprise grade services such as claude, chatgbt very well rounded Ai’s with different value propositions. V0 built its reputation on being accessible to individual developers and small teams.

As for the technical issues point that’s actually concerning. You’re saying users shouldn’t pay for platform failures, but your current model means we pay upfront with no guarantee the interaction will work. If the platform crashes after I’ve used my credits, I’m still out that money.

The ‘small model coming soon’ feels like a slap on band aid solution. What we really need is transparency about your roadmap and pricing strategy, not just promises of future improvements.

Look, we want V0 to succeed that’s why we’re here giving feedback instead of just walking away. But the disconnect between what you’re saying and what users are experiencing is pretty significant right now

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Amy, if I may, I was disappointed to hear of the news with the varied pricing-consumption but I understand that you’ve seen your users + usage skyrocket and hadn’t anticipated that full-on effect. One of the challenges that I have is when there’s an error on the display and if I were to click to fix, it doesn’t tell me what the real issue is but instead rewrites my UI in the process… a step that I never asked for. So we’re still charged for something that we didn’t ask for. I could hit delete previous message/conv - do we get the credits back? In my case, the per costs are much smaller than $8. But it adds up.

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When clicking “Ask v0 to fix” edit the message it automatically puts for you, and edit this message to include “Do not change my ui or any functionality simply fix this issue” and it will resolve that problem! Hope this helps!

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There is so much they should have implemented before a full price change, they could’ve weened us into the new token system, allowing them a chance for us to test the models and iron out errors.

for what Vercel will be losing next month, an minimum average of 70 recurring users leaving next month will surely be more of an impact than allowing us a week trial period on the new changes.

we couldve tracked token use, implemented transparent usage meters and fixed up the Fix me and other v0 related issues.

but instead, we were transistioned abruptly and were forced to sacrafice our own tokens as a way to test their new deployment.

also not sure why you seem to be avoiding my responses…this entire thread was created with AI based on my original thread, i am the core user triumphing for the community and all ive recieved is scrutiny.

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I appreciate you being willing to talk calmly with me about this. Many folks are so frustrated that they seem to forget real people are receiving all of this feedback and doing our best to respond with honest info.

As Max said, we are not reverting the pricing change right now. We’re aware that some people don’t prefer the new pricing. This is not the place for pricing negotiations. I’m not here to argue about it.

Everyone’s feedback has been noted from here and other sources. The change started rolling out just a couple of weeks ago, so quite a few accounts are not on usage-based pricing yet. We wouldn’t make this kind of change without a lot of careful planning. It’s going to take more time to collect the quantity and quality of data needed for good decision making about any future adjustments.

I’m not able to share the complete roadmap, but if there’s something specific you’re looking for, I’d be happy to check the rough timeline for it. Otherwise, all I can say is that the team is always working on improvements based on feedback and metrics, and they ship updates as quickly as possible.

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Amy, thank you for the follow up and for acknowledging the frustration in the community. I really do appreciate that you’re taking the time to engage with us directly it really does make a difference.

I understand you can’t revert pricing immediately, and honestly this pricing idea is fair just not implemented right, and I respect that this isn’t the place for negotiations. But since you mentioned the team is collecting data for future decisions, here are some specific suggestions that could help rebuild trust:

Transparent Updates Instead of rolling out changes that surprise users, consider more open communication about what’s coming. A simple changelog or beta testing program would let us prepare and give feedback before changes hit our live projects. When updates cause disruptions to our websites (which has happened), it feels like we’re beta testing in production.

Message Reliability The $7-8 messages are a real problem, and honestly, there should be a hard cap. No single interaction should cost more than $1-2 maximum, regardless of complexity. If the system thinks a request needs more resources, it should ask for confirmation first rather than just charging whatever it decides.

Technical Issue Credits When V0 generates broken code, times out, or gives empty responses, we need automatic credit refunds. Right now users are paying for the platform’s mistakes, which feels really unfair.

Timeline Transparency: Even rough estimates would help. Is the small model weeks away? Months? Just knowing whether to hold tight or look for alternatives would be huge.

Thanks again for engaging with the community on this. It really does matter that you’re here listening.

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18

This is an eloquent summary of the things a lot of people have been trying to say. Great suggestions. I’ve passed these along to the team.

Regarding the small model timeline, think days rather than months :slightly_smiling_face:

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Amy, this is fantastic news thank you so much for not only listening but acting on our feedback so quickly. The fact that you’ve already passed these suggestions to the team and that we’re looking at days rather than months for the small model is honestly going to help tons of users. Your responsiveness here really demonstrates the kind of partnership approach that makes developers want to stick with a platform long term, and knowing we’re talking days gives us the confidence to plan around V0 rather than scrambling for alternatives. Thanks again for taking the time to engage with us directly and for getting these concerns in front of the right people so quickly looking forward to testing the updates! :folded_hands:

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Nobody who has some market experience was expecting nothing diferent but…
We have our business that was direct impact by your brutally move against community. At least what we expect was some time to pack our stuff, which you even that have the courtesy. All this is a message about how you are but above all who you think you are. We are all pay your unfair probably ilegal one hundred percent billing raise. There is no other way to put it, you think your community is not big and important enough but I can tell you that market wont forgive.

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What do you mean by that? How has the pricing directly affected you and your company?

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Really? If my supplier raises prices in 100%, how does it affect my organization?

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I understand your concerns, but large organizations shouldn’t rely entirely on AI for software development. While AI pricing has increased significantly, creating substantial software projects still costs only a few hundred dollars with effective prompting. Businesses naturally adapt to market changes, and sometimes that means accepting certain losses as part of doing business. The reality is that AI has likely contributed to your company’s current success, even with the pricing challenges. I agree the pricing situation isn’t ideal, but directing frustration toward employees isn’t productive since they don’t control these decisions. Our best approach is to advocate for improved services and more reasonable pricing while pushing for better versions of v0.

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AI costs is falling like a rock around the world, its like electric energy. It’s completely non sense to say that AI is becoming expensive.
And it’s not just about the extremely high costs v0 is imposing is about the relationship with the tool. Yes I could agree more about adaptability, my point is that out of nowhere some company we were using and counting on just shift its business model completely and the worst part is that is obvsly a very bad planning change. The product they deliver is rare now but will be less and less, just look to Firebase Studio, Bolt, Lovable. The hardest part of a business like this today is customer loyalty and the power we have to bring others. In long term its just jumb from the bridge.

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