Your capital costs for buying those machines don't go away.

That's a problem that already exists in power generation and delivery, and it's already been solved. Bills are sums of fixed terms and variable terms.

Custom payment schemes are late stage profit generation. It requires hoards of salespeople or an AI that can actually do math.

It's just how hyperscaling works. You are not wrong, but in the wrong timeline.

I'm not talking about custom, negotiated service contracts, I'm talking about simply charging people for what they use.

But that would be using (a special Claude code version) of the API; as it stands now, I have tried the current api for fun and I hit $200 well within an hour. So if they would charge for real use, no one would use it as there are competitors who have less harsh limits with tier plans still. If all go away then I will be running open models on vast.ai or so as those are now viable (been testing with glm 5 and it's great for coding). So tier subscriptions cannot go away as it will end those companies fast.