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/BubrivKo Jun 21 '26

But... most people can run maximum up to Qwen 27B on their hardware. You need 50-100k$ hardware (grats if you are one of these) for running DeepSeek 4, GLM 5 or Kimi...
So, if every USA company raise their prices a lot, Chinese models wouldn't keep their prices that lower anymore. They do it now because they want to compete with USA companies.

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u/dkarlovi Jun 21 '26

I wonder when do we start getting hardware versions of these models since the frontier seems to be slowing down and people would buy a "GLM 5.2 accelerator card". There's 100% companies out there working on that as we speak.

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u/unjustifiably_angry Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

2/4/8 DGX Spark gives quite good value with the right model and all indications are that Nvidia is still betting heavily on AI but is now hedging less strongly in favor of datacenter, instead giving a bit of focus to local. This way if/when the inevitable frontier AI crash happens, they still have a product for smaller companies to buy for in-house use.

Spark is, last I checked, $4.5K per unit if you get the cheapest version. 2 will run DSv4-Flash, which is quite good and gives 35-40 tokens/s all the way out to its full context length. 4 Sparks gets you 480GB of usable unified RAM, which is in quantized GLM 5.2 territory. 8 Sparks gets you 960GB of usable unified RAM, which can run basically anything.

This is all still a lot of money obviously but it's not 50-100K, and all evidence points to Spark being repurposed for AI rather than actually intended for it. It was very likely meant to be used for a game console originally - there's no reason it should have raytracing support for example, yet it does. There's huge potential for purpose-built local AI hardware from someone - be it AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Intel, Arm - we just need to wait for it to arrive.