> They’re just pricing it in line with capabilities.

So... convergence?

> but they’re managed such that the average subscription turns a healthy profit.

It didn't work like that, or at least that's not how it played out. People max-out their subs all the time which is why strict and multiple limits were implemented by all providers. Also, I subscribe to z.ai and recently they dropped the quota significantly that now their sub offers less than Claude and OpenAI. It's still x5-6 what it would cost on API costs though.

> inference is just cheaper in terms of ops TCO than people assume, and API margins are very high.

API margins (at least american ones) are probably healthy. But I don't think that inference is that cheap. It would cost 300-500k to just run GLM 5.2. There are lots of other factors too: reliability (can you keep the GPUs running all time), electricity cost, sys. admin costs, location costs, etc.. I wouldn't be surprised if the API margins are quite close to operational costs.