alt Hacker Newsit's a very handwavey way to "explain" anything. Yes, they make money. But they have competition. And if someone runs out of tokens and switches to deepseek or just goes for a friggin hike in the woods, that does not benefit them. If they get a public image of a ripoff that burns all shit on trivial tasks, that does not do them good either. So there is a limit to this "companies make money" thing.
Sure, fair enough. Clearly, if they increase costs by too much, people will go to their competitors, but those competitors also make money selling tokens, so the whole industry is incentivized to inflate token consumption up to the point of driving people to the competition. And nobody is incentivized to reduce token count.
In fact, the one model with great price/performance is Deepseek v4 Flash and I suspect that they are subsidizing it deeply to get access to everyone’s prompts for training. We may find that they raise prices on the next version (v5) after they’ve mined the user data.