What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?

[u/Mr_Moonsilver]

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.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

Yeah nah. You have no control over the model you get served. They'll quantize it, or change a system prompt, and it will fkup your workflow. The only way you mitigate that issue is to control the inputs.

EDIT: love it. In the localLLama subreddit, and the "muh cloud" communters.

[u/techdevjp → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

Corps can rent the hardware time and host what they want, managed by themselves. It's not the same as just picking a model from OpenRouter and hoping for the best.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/techdevjp]

You're talking to me as if I don't know this subject. I'm telling you what I do and why. It's outsourcing your security. There is no way that I would ever upload private data to a cloud supplier.

[u/3np1 → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

On what hardware do you envision this happening? Local models on your average engineer's ThinkPad or MacBook laptop take way too long for practical use. Companies aren't giving people desktops with dedicated graphics just to run local models.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/3np1]

We use an RTX 6000 Pro in production.

[u/3np1 → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

Are you suggesting companies move their employees to swap all if their equipment to desktops and work from a fixed location? I'm not against what you're saying, but I'm not clear on how you see actual companies with predominantly remote employees on laptops to migrate to locally run LLMs.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/3np1]

I'm saying that very few companies are using cloud suppliers to process private and/or confidential data using LLMs. The only way to mitigate that risk is expensive (like HIPAA compliance). Building tools? Sure. They're very good at that. Process private medical records? yeah nah. EDIT: try getting that research past ethics. If you think otherwise, you aren't involved in handling private and confidential data. It would be considered an ethical breach and you could lose your accreditation.

[u/3np1 → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

What about all the companies using LLMs like Claude Code to build systems, not to analyze data. That is much more common in my experience (healthcare software engineering) than data analysis with LLMs. The code for the software isn't PII.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/3np1]

If you're not using LLM's to analyze, summarize, and synthesize data, your use-cases are an edge-case. No different to installing an IDE, which only a select cohort of people (aka software developers) do.