I read posts like these all the time and I keep wondering when they'll begin to tighten the screws on the prosumers. I think most, if not all, $200/mo individual accounts are blasting high multiples of that amount in tokens. I mean we know that doesn't work with current inference costs, not by a longshot, so I guess this is just a way to pad their numbers like "look, we're growing our user base!" while they can still somewhat hide the "actually, we're hemorrhaging money on inference" in their accounting.
how do we know they aren't making 9800$ profit on inference from 10k$ tokens at api pricing?
You can't drive prosumers anywhere near API prices. I would guess that the maximum you can extract from vast majority of prosumers is maybe $500/mo, and even that is a big stretch.
Once you cross that threshold, prosumers will simply fall back to using Chinese models and/or self-hosting smaller models, with more efficient and tight workflows.
You'd be killing your consumer line completely.