If you're paying $200/month for something I can do with open source software and $10/month of compute, why wouldn't I offer you the service for $100/month? And then someone offer it for $50?

Not everyone has to know about, understand, or use open source solutions for it to open the field.

If you can do a $200/mo service for $10/mo, the closed source will reduce their prices to $15/mo and beat you

This is just a weird dichotomy you're introducing. Open source will introduce price pressure as any competition will - that doesn't mean you won't have a monopoly.

If you have virtually no pricing power and have to drop your $200/mo to $15/mo that's a big deal if your $300bn valuation is implying that not happening, which is what OP's point is about

Idk what you mean by saying this doesn't preclude a monopoly - having your pricing power eroded by competition is kinda one of the key features of what a monopolistic market isn't

Not at all. Monopolies don't imply an anti-rigid price curve. In fact, monopolies almost never have that.

A monopoly means a company has enough leverage to corner and disproportionately own the market. This is entirely possible (and usually the case) even with significant pricing pressure.

I think you're both missing a bigger picture. How many of these services can now be replicated in-house by a single developer? Which part of the service actually costs money once that dev deconstructs the process?

Feels like I won't be paying for anything that isn't real-time. And that any time delay I can introduce in my process will come with massive savings. Picture hiding the loading of loot info behind a treasure chest opening animation in a game, except that time difference means you can pull all the work in-house.

Openrouter.ai seems like a step in the right direction but I'd want to do all their calculations myself as well as factor in local/existing gear in a way they don't.

Right now you can't run it that cheap at home.

You need to pay energy bill, do the update/upgrade and you need to build a LLM rig.

Nvidias Digits Project could be very interesting, but this box will cost 3k.

We are a lot closer to running it at home than i assumed we would but plenty of people prefer SaaS over doing stuff themselves.

That's true, but if someone sells you a one-time-purchase box/gadget/phone that will do a snapshot SOTA work and not cost you $20-$200/mo in subscriptions, a lot of people would be in.

Right now the average person has to go through a vendor with a web app, there's not a lot of room for the public to explore.

Things could change in a hurry.

They don't seem to care about Ai either. The vast majority of people care about the value they're getting, companies care abut open source because its usually free.

I don't think we expect a company to exist solely making a proprietary web server anymore and be a behemoth of 300B. OpenAi might end up at the same model as Nginx or Docker if they don't pivot or find a different model.