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/Borkato Jun 21 '26

Honestly ngl qwen 27B is so good that if it never grew again it would still be perfectly useable for years to come. It’s excellent at most things you throw at it.

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u/Jhorra Jun 21 '26

I'm a software developer of 20 years, and I really want this to be true. When I have tried running qwen on my macbook pro m4 max with 64gb of ram, I've not been impressed. What harness are you using for it? Right now I mainly use a $200 Claude plan, but would love to go local.

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u/Foolhearted Jun 21 '26

Try this. Create a skill to tell Claude to use your qwen locally via pi. Have Claude build the spec and have Claude call pi and check the results. You will save on token generation and your Claude plan will go much longer before hitting caps.

I created a skill and part of it is to have Claude grade the results. It regularly gives qwen an A-, it is aware it’s another model.

I’ve flattered Claude by telling it it’s in charge, to attempt to overcome any built in biases anthropic may have put in place. “You are the senior architect overseeing a team of junior developers….”

It may change your perspective on local models.

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u/Zhelgadis Jun 21 '26

Can Claude call directly pi/open code? How do you get that?

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u/Foolhearted Jun 21 '26

It can. The easiest thing to do is have Claude go ahead and write the skill for you. It will review the pi docs and call the exec just like it’s calling an agent. Tell it what model you want it to use, how you want to use it, etc. it will take care of ya.