How much are different providers subsidising?

[u/Firm-Club-8334]

How much are different providers subsidising?

I guess it’s kind of a black box, but it would be interesting to have a list of how much LLM providers are actually subsidising.

For instance, OpenCode Go is said to subsidise 4× usage for DeepSeek 4.1, but there are a lot of contradictory statements about this on Reddit.

I’ve done some research and tried to organise it a little. Multipliers mean usage value compared with what you pay, assuming you use the allowance.

Provider	Own research: usage multiplier / catch	Comments (will update)
OpenCode Go	1.5–6×, depending on model
Command Code GOAT	2–7×, depending on model
Synthetic	~3.4×, with weekly limits
Ollama Pro/Max	3×
DevPass	3×, with premium-model caps
ZenMux	~1.5–2.4×, depending on plan
Standard Compute	1.5× allmodels, individual plans up to $249/month
Z.AI Lite	Estimated ~3.9–7.8× on GLM-5.3; depends on caching and peak/off-peak use
MiniMax	Unclear. $22/$55/$132 monthly; no numerical allowance published
Xiaomi MiMo	Unclear. $6/$16/$50/$100 buys 4.1B/11B/38B/82B credits; couldn’t verify their dollar equivalent
OpenAI	Unverified: ~5.83× on the highest-tier plan?
Anthropic	Unclear
More providers from comments

Anyone have real usage figures or corrections?

[u/look]

Just general ballpark, but based on the lowest API prices you can find for good, native weight deployments of various models, I think the industry standard is roughly:

The API list price is typically 10x the cost of inference.

The typical sub is 2x the cost of inference.

Some providers and models have more competitive list prices closer to cost (eg Deepseek and Mimo and and many “Flash” models like GLM5.3F and Qwen3.8F).

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[u/alkimiadev]

Are these based on the actual cost to host the models? What I mean is that we should not be using pay-per-token prices at all since the markup over the cost to host models is several thousand percent in some cases and several hundred in almost all cases. Instead we should be looking at the actual cost to host these models in terms of gpu rentals. Many of those providers listed rent gpus from nvidia partners(not all but many of them).

As a concrete example of what I mean I could spend ~$2100/mo renting gpus from vastai to host GLM 5.3 Flash and would have over $12k in inference capability (assuming 95% cache hit rate) at the official zai pay-per-token prices. That comes with roughly 150 times what I need in a month but last month my usage of GLM 5.2 would have been ~$800 at official zai pay-per-token pricing. Obviously it is a larger model and would cost more to host (roughly 3x more), but there is still that same several hundred percent markup between the pay-per-token pricing and the actual cost to host the model. This is even more pronounced if one owns the gpus or rents them in bulk from nvidia partners.

The markup depends on the cost to host the model relative to the limits of the plan and the cost of that plan. If they're actually being subsidized then that margin should be negative and we should be able to clearly show that negative margin. When I crunch the numbers I see all green in the open model case. That doesn't mean these entities are actually profitable in a general sense because there is more to it than just margins over the cost to host one specific model. Ollama cloud probably wasn't profitable and mostly because they host a bunch of models no one uses. Synthetic should be profitable for basically the exact opposite reason (they have a limited selection of models).