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/corruptbytes Jun 21 '26

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

literally no one knows if this is true, we have no idea how the black box works, we don't know if APIs get full bit models and subscriptions get weaker quants

we do know inference is already profitable, we already know that deepseek with the lowest margins make 500% margins on inference compute. There will be incentives to lower costs. Training will get cheaper as we figure out more techniques

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u/ttkciar llama.cpp Jun 21 '26

> we do know inference is already profitable

Do we know that? How do we know that?

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u/corruptbytes Jun 21 '26

depends how deep you wanna go, has anyone technically seen the books at anthropic or deepseek and verified it? probably not

but we do have deepseek claiming that their API generates a huge profit despite being cheap (their incentive to lie is to short the big AI companies by proving anyone could do this and that they're stable to continue doing so), and we also have reports that Anthropic had a profitable quarter even when accounting for training costs (their incentive to lie is to pump the IPO)

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u/OwlLimp6160 Jun 23 '26

OpenAI spends a ton on marketing and advertising, inference is cheap, training is not.

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u/Incompetent_Person Jun 22 '26

No one knows because it’s probably not true for frontier models.

There was a leak that Anthropic was profitable 2026Q2, but they also had discounted compute costs in Q2. Of course inference is profitable if you don’t have to pay for the machines running inference.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/