I don't think it's as easy as looking at open weight API prices. We don't know whether the operators are making a profit on all the hardware they bought. Maybe the prices we pay just cover electricity. And it's not even certain that running costs are covered by API prices: The operators may be siphoning content and subsidize from selling that.

In the current volatile environment, the API prices are more of a baseline where we can assume it can't be much cheaper to operate these models.

That doesn't make sense in this environment because everyone is compute constrained with huge backlogs they can't fulfill. If these inference providers aren't making any money, they'd simply sell their GPUs to those who are starved for compute.