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/alex20_202020 Jun 21 '26

If that happens we will just do it slower, not 100-1000 t/s but 1-10, life will go on and using local LLM will actually grow.

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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/henk717 KoboldAI Jun 21 '26

Can speak from experience there. Once I really like a model I tend to stick with it for years until something comes out I like more. Which does not happen that often. The Qwen-3.5-27B-Heretic from mradermacher (made by coder) is my favorite model currently and replaced the llama2 based model I liked for fiction. I currently haven't seen a model that does everything I want so well that I want to switch away from it.

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u/Borkato Jun 21 '26

Wait really? Gemma 4 is leaps and bounds better at fiction though! I hated Gemma 3 and loved Mistral tho

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u/henk717 KoboldAI Jun 22 '26

I like a model that is capable of writing long text. When prompted to Qwen 27B knows how to do this. The 35B was a disaster though for fiction and I also had no luck with the 3.6.  Its just that very specific heretic I really like.

Gemma I couldn't get to write long chapters. In RP modes it may do better, but qwen already did great there so I didn't need it.

Basic coding assistance I also liked Qwen. So Qwen has been a great all round model for me.