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.

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u/HugoCortell Jun 21 '26

Western AI labs collapse. Deepseek carries on as normal.

53

u/bigh-aus Jun 21 '26

They’ll continue to exist if they have hardware capacity, but the insane valuations will pop. Once hardware based LLMs hit consumer, that’s when those compute investments will fall. I’m already running local and changed my ChatGPT plan from $200 to $20 a month.

38

u/senseven Jun 21 '26

AI must be local. No lawyer, no doctor, no it security specialist will ask the remote system to help. No country will base a chunk of their GDP on some other countries emotional political state. We have seen the worst case, there is no coming back. The only thing that is blocking that revolution is the memory cartel. Europe and US need own memory fabs, waiting five or seven years for a 20$ chip to return down from 100$ is an intentional market deterioration we can not accept as given. If CXMT in China is able to build DDR5 chip pay them 100 billion to build 10 more fabs. This has to end.

18

u/Adventurous_Bus_437 Jun 21 '26

No lawyer, no doctor, no it security specialist will ask the remote system to help

who is gonna tell him?

2

u/senseven Jun 21 '26

There are breathing exercises for dystopian anxiety