Another take: perhaps they shouldn't have been pricing it at that point if they weren't capable of actually delivering.

It absolutely is. Loss leading is their fault and anticompetitive.

We have seen this before. Companies using VC money to take over the market and then increase prices. In the end, we're worse off without these scumbags but some will still sing that we got free service do it's bot enshitification.

The cost for AI companies might be $5000 but the "essentially free" could be close to the limit of what people are willing to spend. If that's the case then enshittification will continue and/or many AI companies will never be profitable.

It's predatory pricing.