Agreed. I think the Chinese labs are proving that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat in almost every aspect, especially pricing. I also think people are getting annoyed with the constant lift and shift. I've seen more folks drop Claude Code and Codex, specifically, because of the lock-in it provides the providers. I'm curious to see how people standardize on tooling adjacent and if Anthropic, Google or OAI move to block utilization akin to the games Anthropic has been playing as of late.

I think the end game is routed model usage and SLMs. I think Apple is going to prove this in the consumer space pretty handily and I'm curious how the Android ecosystem responds since the hardware is considerably lacking in model performance. I think Apple has a huge opportunity here, as much as I don't like their current ecosystem of walled garden. They did position themselves very well with ARM and custom chips for their hardware. Hopefully the broader ecosystem of ARM and Linux are able to make some headway and we see a more formalized, and broadly accepted, architecture to capitalize on.

I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models. We've got near-frontier capabilities from open source models from China at pennies on the dollar compared to US big tech rollouts. OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?

I'm planning on switching from the $20/month to the $100/month plan.

It's worth it, and I can afford it, but I am not really the right type of user for token-based usage. It's all for personal and free work.

My bet is they'll keep subsidizing for a considerable period of time, at least 1-2 decades more.

Most AI companies are just testing the waters with paid tiers right now, their greatest fear with increased pricing is folks reverting back to wikipedia, stack-overflow and other public domain organic activity buzzing back to life; that will kill any RoI potential in LLMs forever. They're playing the wait game instead, observing how the digital sphere reacts to every little increase in price.

If that weren't the case, they'd be pricing at lucrative premiums already and even gotten away in short-term considering the increased dependency in the enterprise world. But that'd be like killing for the golden egg too soon and losing all long-term potential.

Once the folks are so addicted to LLMs that even writing a hello world program sounds like a nightmare and coming up with an article draft feels like reinventing Egyptian glyphs, that's when the real pricing hammer will come.

Oh for sure. I've been hopping around from provider to provider for the last few years just depending on who has the most capable / subsidized plans at the moment. I definitely expect there will be a squeeze on subscription costs all around the industry post IPO.

A few weeks ago they massively cut usage on free tier.

Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic wanting to switch billing to API rates is them just wanting to generate more profit.