I spend extra on a smartphone because I use the thing all the time, see it all the time, hold it in my hand all the time, it's my camera, music player, note taker and so on.

For AI? Prompt comes in, tokens come out. The value of the 'ecosystem' is roughly zero to me. Switching costs between models are essentially zero. The UI and UX is the same whichever LLM runs underneath.

If you do use llm some, then the $20 tier makes sense, but that's not where the money is. If you use it a lot then a $100 sub probably makes sense. But if you're a BigCo that heavily uses it and pay API prices and suddenly you pay $200 million a month, well, maybe it's worth buying a bunch of hardware and stick it in a basement somewhere, and you won't upload all your secrets to your future competitor to boot. If US labs didn't care about the competition from Chinese models they wouldn't lobby so hard for banning the evil, unaligned, super dangerous communist models that want to steal our freedoms and make our gas expensive.

Ultra-cheap models like Deepseek are also very nice if you need to burn billions and billions of tokens.