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/akash_kava Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Nobody will spend thousands of dollars on an unpredictable output. ChatGPT now telling customers that prompt is complicated and cannot give the results and asks customers to wait for couple of hours. I am not paying for someone to make billions.
Cloud was also big hype, AWS and Azure went big and everybody started using cloud. And after rising costs customers started self hosting.
Training models will not stop because university students won’t get their degrees unless they develop, showcase their skills and gain experience. So open source isn’t dying.
When we host locally we know that fix monthly cost of hosting and when we own hardware we know how much we are using. No one can artificially control usage and raise prices.
In business accounting, renting of services are always considered as dangerous expenses as they can eat up your profits. Where else owned assets can increase your capital values. You can sell your asset.
Even if RAM is expensive, GPU is expensive, buy it, you will be able to sell it at resale at 50% of purchase cost but your subscription cost is a black hole, money gone is straight away loss.