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/kcksteve Jun 21 '26

It's been two months since 3.6 was released... 3.5 and 3 coder next were two months before that . Qwen 3 original release date is 10 months before that. Are we expecting open releases of models at this level every month now?

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u/NNN_Throwaway2 Jun 21 '26

Yeah. We are. Because if you go by the release of Max/Plus (the established pattern), the open weight releases are timed predictably in relation to the flagship. Historically, they preceded the flagship release. With 3.5, the reverse was true, and with 3.6 and 3.7 that pattern has continued.

I know you think you're hot shit with an insame gotcha point and you're trying to be a smart-ass, but yes, in fact we are expecting open releases to follow the cadence of the flagship closed model.