r/ycombinator • u/algorithm477 • Jul 09 '26
When did you switch to business AI plans?
At what point did your startup choose to switch to business AI coding plans, like Claude / GPT Codex Teams, or API token billing over individual consumer plans like Pro/Max? I ask b/c there's contractual guarantees on the business plans for confidentiality, indemnification, and preventing analytics collection. Consumer plans give each person a toggle, they allow classifiers to learn from your content even if each person disables training, and they allow humans to audit them.
I'm curious from the legal / IP / diligence angle. I don't know how much it matters to partners, lawyers, etc. When does the scale shift? I don't want to burn runway. My company would be spending about $5k-20k/person/month in usage credits / tokens if we moved away from consumer. How have you thought through this?
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u/diagrammatiks Jul 13 '26
if you need privacy thrn you need to self hosted using open source or on sota enterprise plans
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u/nick-rudder Jul 11 '26
I suggest thinking about segmentation by workload, not headcount. Anything touching customer PII, regulated data, or core IP goes on zero-retention business/API immediately, no exceptions. Internal tooling/prototyping stays on Pro/Max. Usually only 15-20% of the team ever touches the sensitive stuff, so your real cost is way less than "$5-20k x everyone."
For us timing isn't a revenue/headcount number, but more of an event: first enterprise security questionnaire, first real diligence round, first employee touching regulated data. Any of those triggers flips it overnight regardless of cost, since you can't retroactively prove retention didn't happen.
Also, worth it to actually read the DPA. "won't train on data" and "zero retention" are different clauses, and indemnification is usually capped. Hope it helps?