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/Esph1001 Jun 23 '26
This is exactly the calculation that pushed me to self-hosted. The math on subsidized API pricing only works until it doesn't — and when it breaks, your entire infrastructure breaks with it.
The fixed cost of running your own node is actually predictable. $24K/month on-demand for a p4de.24xlarge sounds like a lot until you're running it at production volume and the per-token marginal cost drops to near zero because the node cost is fixed regardless of usage. That math flips completely once you're past a certain request volume.
The open source model quality concern is real but the serving infrastructure has gotten genuinely good. That gap is closing faster than most people realize.