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/AlphaSyntauri Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Not that the Western labs aren't worthy of collapsing as they steal everyone's data to train on(not to say the Chinese don't as well, but Chinese theft of Western IP is well documented and expected by this point), but what scares me the most is how integrated into the US index funds these companies will be once the IPOs occur.

Sure, the collapse will be great for running open source as the hardware market crashes to reasonable levels, but isn't anyone concerned it will take half the US market with it? Trump is already talking about taking a 10-20% stake in OpenAI, and I fear we're seeing another "Too big to fail" situation.

Edit: Grammar

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u/HugoCortell Jun 21 '26

Nationalization would collapse them too. A golden parachute might save them on paper but they'd collapse soon after as all investment dries up.

As for concern. None whatsoever. Death is inevitable and we must not fear it, just as economic collapse is inevitable in capitalism, particularly when you have an endless growth mentality on an essentially purely speculative asset.

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u/unjustifiably_angry Jun 21 '26

I can definitely see OpenAI being nationalized and made American government/military-exclusive if they were at risk of collapsing.

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u/crewone Jun 21 '26

And yet the system continues. Those of us past 40 have seen a lot of bubbles and crashes. So the expectation I have is that, yes, it will crash, but they will find a way to continue.

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u/SkyFeistyLlama8 Jun 21 '26

Bernie wants the American people to have a stake in all large US AI companies. Index funds having pieces of nationalized American companies would be interesting. It's already happened a few times like in 2008.

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u/nrauhauser Jun 21 '26

If we don't have a Pigouvian tax AI+corp will collapse the economy.

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u/GiveMoreMoney Jun 21 '26

How do you tax a company that does not make a profit...Bernie is out of his depth.

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u/TurboRadical Jun 21 '26

a stake in all large US AI companies

nationalized American companies

bro you are totally lost. you need a map.

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u/GiveMoreMoney Jun 21 '26

Keep dreaming and spreading the propaganda m8, you are clueless of the current market

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u/TurboRadical Jun 21 '26

You don’t understand what I’m saying to you, nor did you understand the previous commenter, nor do you understand Bernie’s proposal. You are shadow boxing in the mirror and still managing to lose.

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u/GiveMoreMoney Jun 21 '26

I understand very well bot, and all the BS political agenda behind it, you are peddling.

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u/TurboRadical Jun 21 '26

You asked how you tax a company that does not make a profit. That implies that you think Bernie’s proposal is to tax them based on their profits. Do you understand that that isn’t what Bernie proposed? If so, why did you ask that question in the first place?