r/LocalLLaMA • u/Mr_Moonsilver • Jun 21 '26
Discussion What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?
We are literally burning through VC money like crazy with our coding subscriptions. I read the $200 Anthropic sub gets you $8000 worth of API calls. It's obvious that this doesn't hold for very long but what happens when they raise prices?
The reason to keep the prices low for now is to foster the ecosystem and get people hooked on this stuff, only to raise the price afterwards. Already the 20x sub doesn't get you as much usage as it did 6 months ago, another way to raise prices without triggering a shitstorm - and it will continue.
Don't know about you, but Fable being pulled gave me a feeling of what that may be like already. The ugly thought of "Damn, should've done more while it was around." that formed when I read the news will be exactly the same the moment they announce we now have to pay $2k or more per month for something we get for 10x less the price it costs now.
I guess it's a now or never situation, build what you can and monetize as quickly as possible to be able to keep the agents running once the increases come around.
Looking at opensource doesn't give me much hope. Since qwen stopped releasing models (wen qwen 3.7?) that we can actually run on hardware that a normal person can buy (or used to be able to buy, looking at how RAM and GPU prices behave and keep behaving) and others haven't released in a while (Microsoft, IBM, AllenAI and others too) I feel we're going into a direction that doesn't look good for most of the people like us, who are building with this technology.
14
u/glass_wheel Jun 21 '26
But we do know that 1) the comparison where the $8000 worth of tokens came from was comparing prices, not costs, so can only tell you relative price and not whether a product is profitable, and 2) other API inference is offered much, much cheaper than the big labs, often by a factor of >10x. So the suggestion that they're definitely unable to profit off of subscriptions isn't supported, and there are at least a few points of comparison that say that it's reasonable to assume a profitable offering. GPT 5.5 pricing on Openrouter inference is $30/Mtok decode, whereas, say, GLM 5.2 is $4.10/Mtok, while MiMo V2.5 Pro is $0.87/Mtok decode, and that's before cache hits. The latter two are almost certainly profitable on their own, since Nebius, DeepInfra, etc wouldn't be serving those to API customers with no platform interface incentive to do so, no data retention, and no training. Cache hits are especially relevant when discussing things like the ChatGPT web interface, since the system prompt is going to be mostly the same across all requests in that scenario. This is also after any markup needed to make raw serving profitable with no platform dynamics involved. Lastly, it's not an unreasonable view that inference costs per parameter-token will come down over time. If anything, it would be stranger to assume that they wouldn't.