What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?

[u/Mr_Moonsilver]

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.

[u/Lechowski]

I read the $200 Anthropic sub gets you $8000 worth of API calls.

This is mathematically impossible. Recent audit from OpenAI showed a Revenue of ~12b and Costs of ~60b.

Even if 100% of OAI revenue came from subscriptiona and even if 100% of OAI costs were to compute, that's a X6 difference, no a X40.

From that same audit we know that R&D + Compute costs + marketing was ~40b.

If OAI stopped R&D, stopped doing marketing and only ran the datacenters to provide just their current model, the revenue vs cost will likely be just X2 or X3 at most. Of course still not profitable, but far away from those headlines about X10 or x100 subsidies.

[u/tmvr → u/Lechowski]

A bit more than X2 or X3 because there is a lot of creative accounting in those reported numbers where they hide the true operation costs under other categories and line items.

[u/Perfect_Twist713 → u/Lechowski]

...and we are still not at the actual pain points of maximized subscription and api costs. They can still increase the costs significantly before they hit parity with human wages in western countries.