>dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough

And do you trust companies to keep subsidizing the "cheap" models? The reason for the memory crisis isn't due to consumer DRAM but affects it nonetheless.

Remember, the kinds of families being talked about here are on districts that apparently cannot afford basic learning supplies and it's a "fantasy" to get them more funding. Who's footing the bill?

>and you have unlimited access to it.

You keep handwaving the costs but not providing good argument for who's covering it. There's no such thing as a free (or in this case, unlimited) lunch. A disadvantaged family may not be able to bear yet another subscription (and again, that train has already left on subscription based syst3ms), a school district would need to fund this for thousands of students, likely funded by property taxes.

>not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.

Yes. Their earnings reports reflect this. The companies are running defecits to fund this. They are the ones subsidizing it.

We all know that will not last forever in this post ZIRP economy. Proponents for AI love to argue about the capabilities in 3-5 years whenever flaws in AI models arise, but seem sheepish to talk about the costs and monetization models. But the latter is the real important part when talking on the scale of an entire education system. I think we can all agree that the products that win such educational bids are rarely the highest quality ones.