And for those on API billing? Opus is still quite pricy for what you're getting done with it.

[delayed]

Why stay on API billing? A $200 monthly subscription has a crazy amount of usage and more than enough for a couple of concurrent projects.

Enterprises with more than 150 seats have to pay API costs.

Or get multiple teams. Just use git instead of artifacts ;-)

Because you can't get subscription if your company has more than 150 users.

So they move to non SOTA models.

If you're on API billing then presumably you're a business, and $1,000 a month is still reasonable for that quality of work

Those subscriptions won't be subsidized forever. At least not as much as they are today.

API token inference is subsidizing the rest of the business.

Price per token is dropping (though anthropic are doing dastardly things such as using new tokenizers that use 30% more tokens), efficiency will likely increase.

If the subscriptions (of all of the big companies - unlikely?) give a poor amount of value in the future, will move to trusted/open router and use a harness that uses the latest cheap good models for most things, more expensive models as orchestrators.

Already there are non-SOTA models that should be sufficient for most non-coding tasks, and soon for coding, also.

The future is bright, in that respect, without subsidizing the ridiculous IPOs.

People keep saying this, but inference itself is not what is being subsidized. The expense for electricity/hardware/datacenter operations/etc for an inference token is less than what they charge for it, so that cost doesn’t HAVE to go up to be profitable.

The thing that is being subsidized is the TRAINING costs, and that is because they aren’t selling enough tokens yet to pay for the training costs. This is just like most other growth businesses, though, and if enough people use enough inference, it can be self sustaining.

Or $20 for the same amount of work with US/EU hosted Deepseek flash v4.1.

Assuming the price would converge to the subscription price, not the API price.

For users who pay subscription costs, 100% right.

But for enterprises, who have to pay API costs with no discounts, no way.

Only because you're being heavily subsidized.

They make money on API costs not subscriptions. Subscriptions are not going to last forever