I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key.

For a company, paying $10K a year for a quality service, that's a no-brainer. Most companies spend that money on alcohol in company onsites. However, if you're charging really high prices (the Datadogs of the world), then you're going to face tougher competition from cheaper alternatives that might be as good as you, and when companies need to cut costs, which they often do, you'll be in trouble.

I think what it means to many software companies is that prices will significantly go down on average but the median might not see significant decrease. Companies will be smaller and more lean, hiring less people in general (not just engineers!). There will be more companies out there, so hopefully it will even out.

Last thing is that every product will have too many options to choose from. This has been the reality actually for a long time and going to get much worse. How you market and brand your product and acquire customers will become more difficult than ever.