AI has been all the rage these days so we created a mini-app to help calculate how much a query would cost on each of OpenAi’s large language models (LLM). Currently the cost is pretty cheap, and can be as low as $0.0004 per thousand tokens, but for businesses that may use millions of tokens, the cost can stack up quickly. That’s why we built a quick calculator to compare the cost among all the different language models based on how many tokens you plan to use.

The calculator is simple. Enter the number of tokens for your prompt and see how the cost differs among all the different language models. You can find the link here to use or make a copy (it's free): 

https://subset.so/community/file/6r0H0lxrgRBUysoTTUMCWz/GPT-Pricing

Here’s how we built this on calculator on Subset if you’re interested in building something similar for yourself.

It was quite simple. First, I went on https://openai.com/pricing to figure out the pricing for GPT-4, GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, Ada, Babbage, Curie, and Davinci.

I created an input for token prompt length input. If I wanted to I could have also created an input for number of words and made an assumption on how many words 1000 tokens can create, but in this calculator, I just used number of tokens.

Then for each of the language models, I created a section for 

I just link that to the input I created earlier.

OpenAI Pricing Calculator

As a customer success manager, keeping track of multiple users and their individual needs can be challenging. After 100s of interviews, it seemed that the most common challenges were the ability to keep track of these different users and proactively managing relationships to prevent churn ahead of time.

We noticed that there were plenty of software tools, especially for extremely large companies, to automate this process, but they cost a ton. At the same time, smaller companies either neglected customer support, spent too much time building and maintaining a spreadsheet, or spending too much money on an overpowered CSM software product. That's where our free CSM Tracker comes in! We built a fully reusable and customizable tracker, which is the perfect solution to help keep track of customers' status, last engagement date, renewal date, account owner, churn reason, playbook (based on churn reason), and more.

In my opinion, a CSM tracker is essential for any company because it helps to manage customers effectively. For all companies, there really is only two ways to earn revenue: get new customers and retain existing customers. A CSM Tracker ensures that companies have all customer data organized in one place, making it easy to manage and take action. By keeping track of customer status, last engagement date, and renewal date, a CSM tracker helps you prioritize which customers should be prioritized so they end up renewing their business with you. Even if these customers end up churning, the benefit of the CSM tracker in this case is that it helps you plan around the expected loss of revenue in the foreseeable future.

Easy-to-use without any knowledge of spreadsheets

Categorize customers based on status: good, unknown, churn risk, and churning

Track last engagement date, renewal date, and account owner

Fully reusable and customizable (you can fill out your own customers, status’ churn reasons, and playbook)

Using our CSM Tracker is super easy! Just follow these simple steps:

https://subset.so/community/file/4wPZqJvFyOP2b3qdEATFFA/Customers-and-Renewal-Tracker

Add your customers' information, including their status, last engagement date, renewal date, account owner, churn reason, and playbook.

Review this file every time you sign up a new customer and periodically to remind yourself who you need to reach back out to

Use the playbook column to take the necessary actions to prevent churn for those customers that may churn

Our CSM Tracker has several benefits that make it the perfect solution for managing your customers. Here are some of the benefits of using our tracker:

Easy to use: Our tracker is super easy to use and doesn't require any special knowledge of spreadsheets, making it accessible to everyone.

Fully customizable: You can customize the tracker by adding or removing columns based on your needs, making it flexible and adaptable to your business requirements.

Saves time: Our tracker saves you time by organizing all the information you need about your customers in one place, making it easy to manage and take action.

Prevents churn: Our tracker helps you prevent churn by categorizing customers based on their status and providing a playbook column that updates automatically based on the churn reason.

Our free CSM Tracker is the perfect solution for managing your customers without having to pay for an expensive software tool or deal with complex spreadsheets.

So, what are you waiting for? Start using our CSM Tracker today and see the difference it can make in managing your customers!

Free CSM Trackers

Are spreadsheets a programming language if they often need low code solutions to fill the gap between it and software? If spreadsheets are considered a programming language, then it’s the most unique one of them all. 

To master it, you have to learn their unique command line (in each cell), R1 notation, and effectively pandas (each spreadsheets own library of functions and tools). And if you’re using Microsoft, you have to learn their suite and VBA. Satya Nadella also calls it a programming language as he does 

If you do a simple search for “how many people can program” the answer is usually somewhere around 25M and 40M people. This clearly does not include people who use spreadsheets, since that number is more closely to be estimated at around 1 billion people and growing.

In some ways, spreadsheets are actually better than traditional programming languages. The standard A1 notation grid offers several advantages from a programming perspective:

There is no requirement to name things since everything can be referenced by row and column

You type implicitly. When you reference another variable/cell, you can just click the cell you are referring to and see the relationship

There is no “running,” “compiling,” or even “stopping.” (You can turn on “manual calculations” in Excel where you can force this behavior by pressing F9 to “run,” but most people do not do this)

There is no hidden state to keep track of in your head

Very easy to bulk edit. Several features within spreadsheets make this possible, but one example is pressing CMD+R or CMD+D to autofill

Unlike programming, where there are a million ways something can be broken and they can be interconnected (do I have the most updated node module? do I have the right .env file? syntax error? runtime error?), in spreadsheets, aside from a circular reference, errors are confined in the cells that they occur in

On the flip side, there are a few disadvantages to spreadsheets, and these are likely why it’s often not included in the “traditional programming” camp.

They’re not very reusable — unlike the beautiful ecosystem of sharing code and leveraging online libraries and packages, spreadsheets basically only work for the specific use case they were built for

The lack of names makes spreadsheets less dynamic/automatic. Most spreadsheets require more manual effort to “update” vs. the same program written in code

You can see this when a financial analyst updates a model with a new dataset to get an answer compared to a programmer reusing their SQL queries on the new dataset

There is less flexibility on UI/UX given a spreadsheet’s confinement in a grid. Even though you can technically build Twitter with a spreadsheet, you could never make it look as good

This admittedly depends on how a spreadsheet or program is built, but debugging tends to be harder in spreadsheets because you must evaluate formulas in every single cell

The other argument is that spreadsheets is more akin to the IDE where you do some functional programming versus being a full on programming language. And in that IDE people generally build things that are “one-off” and not full on “software applications,” which is an important distinction. What people build in spreadsheets today tend to be one off calculations and report that people just start from scratch, compared to software which tends to be “unbreakable,” “composable,” and “reusable.” But does this really disqualify something as a programming language? If I only use Python in Jupyter Notebooks where I start from scratch often, I would still consider my self a programmer…

Even when someone ends up building something less trivial in spreadsheets, the long term result is different than if it was built using real programming. They tend to be less maintainable and have very little documentation with most of the knowledge sitting with the original author. If you’ve ever worked at a company that had a large and complicated Excel file, there is always the expert for it. And if that expert ever left, the file often became useless with the next person only using pieces of it while rebuilding the rest with their own logic.

Lastly, and paradoxically the least and most important point, is that most people I’ve met find spreadsheets to be an “easier” endeavor compared to programming and therefore exclude it as a programming language. Even the best spreadsheet users don’t usually consider themselves as programmers and view it to be an order of magnitude harder (just ask your finance and investment banking friends).

My conclusion is that spreadsheets are a programming language, but not used as such because there is less tooling to make it accessible and the culture behind it is not there. However, in my opinion, I think it’s important to consider it as a programming language universally. Historically, we’ve heard about the shortage of programmers in the US, but that’s because it excluded one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Given how much “easier” people consider spreadsheets to be than programming, improving spreadsheets may be our best bet to make everyone a programmer!

Our goal at Subset is to make this transition happen by providing tools to allow spreadsheets to build more reusable apps and change the culture to one where people share their code and apps for others to reuse. Why is that important? If more people have confidence in their ability to build stuff using spreadsheets as a programming language, it’ll result in a stronger, more creative, and more productive world. Given that there are 750M to 2B spreadsheet users, the impact could be astronomical.

What do you think? Do you think spreadsheets are a programming language?

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Are spreadsheets a true programming language?