Yea specialized models could also be resold in a shareware style, like even if it cost 50$ to produce you'd just have to sell 10 copies of it to people for 5$.

Which 5$ is a pretty easy sell if its useful in any way, It's pretty easy to justify a purchase if its yours forever and doesn't use much CPU so is easy to run I mean people were spending 1000$+ on mac mini setups to run local llms or run remote agents.

It wouldn't cost $10 for their lifetime use if they used cheap models instead. Mistral Small 3 24B is probably substantially better than their Qwen 3 0.6B trained model and would give you about 500,000–2,000,000 English to Bash translations. If they're a heavy user, they might use $0.30 in total, ever.

They also used Astra for the coding, which they can't get on a $10 subscription. And then there's the actual training cost.