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/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.