Deepseek v3.2 tokens are $0.26/0.38 on OpenRouter. That model - released 4 months ago - isn't really good enough by today's standards, but its significantly stronger than Opus 4.1, which was only released last August! In 12 months I think its reasonable to expect there will be a model with less cost than that which is significantly stronger than anything available now.

And no, it isn't ONLY because VC capital is being burned to subsidize cost. That is impossible for the dozen smaller providers offering service at that cost on OpenRouter who have to compete with each other for every request and also have to pay compute bills.

Qwen3.5-9B is stronger than GPT-4o and it runs on my laptop. That isn't just benchmarks either. Models are getting smaller, cheaper and better at the same time and this is going to continue.