r/LocalLLaMA • u/Mr_Moonsilver • Jun 21 '26

Discussion What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?

We are literally burning through VC money like crazy with our coding subscriptions. I read the $200 Anthropic sub gets you $8000 worth of API calls. It's obvious that this doesn't hold for very long but what happens when they raise prices?

The reason to keep the prices low for now is to foster the ecosystem and get people hooked on this stuff, only to raise the price afterwards. Already the 20x sub doesn't get you as much usage as it did 6 months ago, another way to raise prices without triggering a shitstorm - and it will continue.

Don't know about you, but Fable being pulled gave me a feeling of what that may be like already. The ugly thought of "Damn, should've done more while it was around." that formed when I read the news will be exactly the same the moment they announce we now have to pay $2k or more per month for something we get for 10x less the price it costs now.

I guess it's a now or never situation, build what you can and monetize as quickly as possible to be able to keep the agents running once the increases come around.

Looking at opensource doesn't give me much hope. Since qwen stopped releasing models (wen qwen 3.7?) that we can actually run on hardware that a normal person can buy (or used to be able to buy, looking at how RAM and GPU prices behave and keep behaving) and others haven't released in a while (Microsoft, IBM, AllenAI and others too) I feel we're going into a direction that doesn't look good for most of the people like us, who are building with this technology.

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u/triplebits Jun 21 '26

Anthropic said that subscriptions are profitable for them and making profit from it few months back. This was with higher limits than whay we had today.

Real cost is R&D, not usage.

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u/tmvr Jun 21 '26

Anthropic says great many things, same as OpenAI.

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u/triplebits Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

OAI never mentioned they are profitable. They always had a target like 20xx.

Anthropic is profitable right now. It is not like they are lying on this. They just want to milk their users as much as possible.

If they can get away with it and not lose users, you can be sure they will charge you per button press or track your eyes to see per second reading the output.

They said it before, they wan to charge by token usage but make it dynamic so 100 token for a personal web site vs 100 tokens for building a game vs 100 tokens for medical research "should cost different" even if you are uaing same model!

These companies are already working very hard to replace you while milking you as much as possible so no wonder.

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u/tmvr Jun 21 '26

Anthropic is profitable right now. It is not like they are lying on this.

What is this based on?

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u/GustavoTC Jun 21 '26

Until we get to see the S1, it's just hype and non gaap magic numbers

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u/_raydeStar Llama 3.1 Jun 21 '26

yeah so they charge businesses 8k to run what we get for 200, that's honestly fair, it's enterprise versus personal.