>OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding.
By itself, this doesn't tell us much.
The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.
I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).
Normally that would be a fair point (and maybe it was valid in 2022).
But given the US approach to foreign policy in 2025, one could argue that the list of countries that “have a contentious relationship with the US” (or, maybe more accurately, the other way around) is a lot longer and less clear-cut today than it was a few years ago.
Except you do still have to think about time, no matter what… Libraries will help with the really messy details, but even the high level requirements have a lot of pitfalls.
“Simple” example that anyone who’s ever worked on a scheduling application will probably be familiar with:
“Get a list with all of today’s events.”
Well, whose “today” (timezone) are we talking about? Server, client, setting in the user account? Or none of the above, and actually timezone at the physical location of the event, if there is one?
And what does “today” mean, anyway? Truncate the date? 00:00-23:59? Business hours?
And what does “today’s event” even mean? Events can cross midnight… Does an event need to start today? End today? Both? Can events span multiple days?
I understand the complexity of time, but this scenario doesn't seem all that difficult. Any user expects (I won't get into what they want) to be shown _their_ day, and they expect it to be local calendar time. You _might_ want to show wee hours events, from midnight to just short of 5am. Apps like Teams do a good job of spacially illustrating time as it matters to you _and_ as it matters to others.
I don't know anything about Cord beyond this article, but my team has worked on many projects over the years where we had to add chat / commenting / notifications functionality.
I can see this being a tough market.
One - it's a crowded field, with many solutions in each of those three categories. I don't think we've actually come across Cord while evaluating solutions, which just shows how noisy it is.
Two - I struggle seeing "chat / commenting / notifications" as a unified category. Every project we've worked on had unique requirements for each of these (whether justified or not...) so every implementation ended up being different.
It's definitely a pain to roll out these features from scratch, and we always preferred using something off-the-shelf where possible.
But by the time you finish evaluating options, pick one, implement and customize it, deal with its limitations and bugs - plus projecting several years of usage costs, and uncertainty dealing with an outside vendor - I can easily see how the balance might tip to doing it in-house in many cases.
Not trying to armchair quarterback - I know how hard startups are, and respect to the Cord team for being in the trenches! Just sharing my experience.
>What's the alternative? A customer service job where you can be rude? There are cultural norms which we all have to obey in a workplace.
Yes, it is a cultural norm. It varies from culture to culture.
There are lots of countries / cultures where "neutral" customer service - say, at a restaurant - is perfectly fine. Others have a baseline expectation for "friendly" service. To the latter, the former might come across as rude...
When visiting the US, I time and time again started telling service staff about how my day was, because they seemed so sincerely happy to meet me and interested in how I was doing.
That’s the number of cases being directly linked to a specific cause, it doesn’t mean that the actual number was 400/year. It’s like someone trying to estimate how much violence exists from watching the news. You’re likely to see major incidents, but you can only estimate the actual total.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was well over 10k/year, but the CDC is conservative with their numbers for good reasons.
Also worth noting that there can be incidents where a massive number of people are infected in a short span.
> with the largest sickening over 2,000 water frolickers in one go.
Lots of people experience isolated events of food-borne illnesses for a variety of reasons. But when a restaurant gets 2000 people sick in a short time frame, we shut it down...and correctly so!
The average annual rate is not terribly informative for making effective public health decisions because it smooths out most of the interesting bits.
For public health decisions I agree, but I'm not making those decisions.
For private health decisions (should my family go to a splash pad or not) the average rate, or chance of infection from one visit relative to other activities, would be more relevant.
The functionality looks very very cool. But the privacy policy raises an eyebrow - am I overreacting?
Usage Information. To help us understand how you use our Services and to help us improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, like the pages or other content you view, the searches you conduct, and the dates and times of your visits.
Desktop Activity on our Services. In order to provide the Services, we need to collect recordings of your desktop activity while using our Services, which may include audio and video screen recordings, your cookies, photos, local storage, search history, advertising interactions, and keystrokes.
Information from Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies. We and our third-party partners collect information using cookies, pixel tags, SDKs, or other tracking technologies. Our third-party partners, such as analytics partners, may use these technologies to collect information about your online activities over time and across different services.
[...]
How We Disclose the Information We Collect
Affiliates.We may disclose any information we receive to any current or future affiliates for any of the purposes described in this Privacy Policy.
Vendors and Service Providers. We may disclose any information we receive to vendors and service providers retained in connection with the provision of our Services.
We work with fortune 500 companies and have HIPAA compliant offerings, so we are very sensitive to privacy and security concerns. Fundamentally the models need to operate on whatever browser tasks users ask Autotab to perform, and we need to use frontier vision models like 4o and Claude to reliably perform them (model providers are the affiliates in question). If you have specific concerns happy to answer them.
Your response doesn't seem to address the Privacy concerns raised. Why is the policy so broad and invasive? There's no mention of how you handle PII data collected as telemetry.
This comment lists most of the questions I would ask. Couldn't agree more. Only advice I would add for the OP:
Check if your contract with the vendor includes any business continuity clauses. What happens to their solution, their code, and your data if they go out of business or get acquired (by someone else)?
One relatively common option is to have them put their code in escrow, and get access to it if certain events happen. You can probably negotiate this into your contract if you have enough leverage.
If their software is critical to your business, and you feel they are stagnant and underfunded, there may be some risk here you can address today - check with your lawyers.
(also, just noticed the username I'm replying to... hi Teren!)
Indeed - good point to ensure business continuity. There should also be a transition period to ensure OP, you’re getting support (like 6 months of service) in addition to code that allows you to address the issue if the vendor does disappear.
By itself, this doesn't tell us much.
The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.
I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).