It's not worth 100 bucks a month for me to have my own shopping app, but maybe it's worth 100 bucks a month to have ready access to a software garden hose that I can use if I want to spew out whatever stupid app comes to my mind this morning.

I'd rather not pay monthly for something (like water) that I'm turning on and off and may not even need for weeks. But paying per-liter is currently more expensive so that's what we currently do.

I think the future is going to be local models running on powerful GPUs that you have on-prem or in your homelab, so you don't need your wallet perpetually tethered to a company just to turn the hose on for a few minutes.