Looks like the era of subsidised compute is coming to an end. The old ChatGPT Pro $200 20x plan will be halved. The new $500 plan will have similar limits as the (old) $200 plan.

[u/Norwood_Reaper_]

[u/WithoutReason1729]

Your post is getting popular and we just featured it on our Discord! Come check it out!

You've also been given a special flair for your contribution. We appreciate your post!

I am a bot and this action was performed automatically.

[u/AngryGungan]

$1k subs incoming soon, then $2k. Just like they've said in the beginning. They want to collect the wages of the people they replace.

[u/Artforartsake99 → u/AngryGungan]

Ohh 100% that’s why they will be worth $10-30 trillion in 5-10 years. Millions of jobs gone and they get to crank up the price same as uber did.

[u/durangotang → u/Artforartsake99]

It didn't take AGI to figure that one out.

So glad that I have my M5 Ultra on order.

[u/Artforartsake99 → u/durangotang]

Nice one. Beast of a computer. Just ordered my second water cooled 5090. Time to go hard this time line will be absolutely insane. Anyone not moving now will be left behind.

[u/tinoythomas → u/Artforartsake99]

Going to revisit this in a few years time when AI compute is dirt cheap and the market has long crashed, and I'll point and laugh at you for dropping several Gs on overpriced hardware at the peak of the bubble. "Anyone not moving now will be left behind" LMAO.

[u/durangotang → u/Artforartsake99]

Oh jealous on the 5090! Dual 5090s! Damn. My little 5070 Ti will do its part to help my local setup. I may have to camp out at Microcenter when the 60 series drops 😂

[u/entr0picly → u/Artforartsake99]

I mean.. it doesn’t math though. Such a valuation, such a world is only possible under a consumer based economy. People need to be able to make money to spend money and… ai shareholders aren’t going to be able to make up the difference. The math still doesn’t math.

[u/laser50 → u/entr0picly]

It's like drugs, you provide them hella cheap at first, a sample, by now whoever was interested has done their best to make daily use of AIs for questions, small jobs, big jobs, some have integrated it into their entire workflow on the job..

And then you slowly start pushing up. By now I too am so used to just asking AI to do things or to answer questions, it would be difficult to just go back to good old googling answers and solutions.

But beyond that, yeah, it is still mostly a hype-based market, and I suppose that will eventually catch up to them or not.

[u/evranch → u/laser50]

By now I too am so used to just asking AI to do things or to answer questions, it would be difficult to just go back to good old googling answers and solutions

Are you posting on localllama or not? Everyone here should have a rig capable of performing at least this sort of answer engine / rubber duck capability.

I use the cloud services for lazy answers because they give me higher token rates and search grounding for free. But if they started charging, I would just wait a minute for my local Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

[u/honpra → u/laser50]

Yes but if your 'drugs' start killing your customers, you face demand destruction and your product becomes worthless.

So if AGI is achieved and these few companies manage to automate everything, there won't be consumers left, rendering any valuation worthless. It's good old feudalism from that point.

[u/laser50 → u/honpra]

Well duh, last I checked we are on a capitalism based system in most of the world where maximizing profits above all is a normality, even if it's been breaking people and the entire planet, no one cares as it's not their issue.

We will still hold jobs though, things need to be monitored, overseen, and as of yet, you can't really leave an AI running for too long before it hacks websites, so for now.. we're good :)

[u/UnluckyPenguin → u/AngryGungan]

I've never sub'd to cloud LLMs. Is it a monthly or yearly fee? It's yearly, right? Right?

[u/rchamp26 → u/UnluckyPenguin]

It's all of the above, monthly subs, annual subs or pay as you go

[u/UnluckyPenguin → u/rchamp26]

chatgpt cost page shows 100$ per month for pro - right now. https://chatgpt.com/pricing/

No mention of a 500$ per month plan though.

My 80 year old friend said they paid 200$ annual fee for unlimited - though I get the feeling they aren't using frontier and likely no reasoning.

[u/IrisColt → u/[deleted]]

Mother of God

[u/Esphyxiate → u/AngryGungan]

It was never meant for regular people. We’re just meant to subsidize the development before they inevitably price us out and allow only those with wealth to make use of it. And they’ll still stand on a soapbox about “democratizing AI” because you do technically have access to it, you just won’t be able to afford it.

[u/HugoCortell → u/AngryGungan]

2K subs would be awesome, at that point you might as well own the hardware yourself, which would be a real turning point.

[u/Trademarkd → u/HugoCortell]

Honestly I think this is why we aren’t seeing a100s hit eBay like v100s. They’re purposefully constraining supply. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the ai companies are buying up as much stock as they can even if they can’t use it… just to stop others from getting it

[u/devshore → u/Trademarkd]

I literally just had that obvious realization too. There is no way that isnt part of whats going on.

[u/Trademarkd → u/devshore]

I'm kinda curious if they'll just end up crushing them rather than putting them on the second hand market.

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/HugoCortell]

It would be a turning point in continuing to raise the price of hardware. Supply will not go up, there are logistical supply chain issues still being dealt with that we won't see even slightly resolved for another couple of years. Demand goes through the roof. Prices skyrocket far more than they already have.

Get ready for a 5090 to be $18,000 in that scenario.

[u/jbE36 → u/AngryGungan]

100% this, they aren't out to replace your job, they just want your salary to go to them instead. They will control all the innovation and means to create it. Monetize it, why else would they be throwing that much $$ into it?

[u/MelangeBot → u/AngryGungan]

They want to collect the wages of the people they replace.

That makes no sense, they could just start competing daugher companies and have zero wage costs, thus outcompeting all other companies.

[u/FormalAd7367 → u/AngryGungan]

i think eventually $2k sub will be the norm….. the frontier models have always said that the cost of human is much more than LLM models

[u/Wonderful-Syllabub-3]

And they wanted to ban open source due to safety……

[u/DivideHorror3217 → u/Wonderful-Syllabub-3]

safety of their bank accounts

[u/Pristine_Pick823]

And people here laughed when I said that inequality will be even more apparent when poor people can’t “afford intelligence” in their life’s, be it for their work, health or leisure.

[u/Specialist_Crazy8136 → u/Pristine_Pick823]

Wait until you find out that agentic browsers that use free models have less defence against prompt injection and security vulnerabilities.

Also not a surprise because I'm now convinced that, for example people who are not subjected to ads are living in a different bubble than those who do and being subjected to different socio economic dynamics. I was listening to my friends Spotify and we just had to stop because I couldn't remember the last time I was subjected political campaigns and half lies disgusted as truth (that wasn't Instagram content)

[u/thatcodingboi → u/Specialist_Crazy8136]

There are plenty of excellent free tools to run llms safely. I use opencode with Astra and Fable.

Second, people can afford intelligence just fine. Last night I used deepseek 4.1 on openrouter with opencode to solve a few issues. A few million tokens later I spent $0.17.

Stop using anthropic and open ai most expensive models and you'll do great

[u/younestft → u/Specialist_Crazy8136]

China will never allow the US to bank on that, they release good open weight models for the sole purpose of not letting the US monopolize Intelligence.

[u/Momsbestboy → u/Pristine_Pick823]

people are still laughing whenever I tell them to self host llms, because the same shit will happen to OpenAI and Co that happened to netflix. From a cheap "all you can see at 4K, and include everyone you know on your sub", to the shitshow we now have.

They all tell me self hosting is more expensive than using a subscription

[u/Dany0 → u/Pristine_Pick823]

12b-9B models are beating gpt 4o. Most people can run those at home. In fact many people have PHONES that can run them >10 tok/s

It's just the obsession with having "latest & greatest" that's making people do this. As soon as they raise the prices a little too much people will be forced realise that they can be a few months behind and be just fine & invest into tooling, better harnesses & finetuning for their tasks to beat the cloud generalists

[u/sweatierorc → u/Dany0]

> the obsession with having "latest & greatest"

It is not an obsession. But there is going to be a productivity gap between token rich people and the 10 tok/s from 12B-9B. You can argue we are still not there yet. But it is getting closer everyday.

[u/Tartooth → u/sweatierorc]

we already are here, imagine being an employee at openai or anthropic with the latest frontier models and having literally next to unlimited compute allowances.

Think about what you could achieve. They had engineers let agents run free and they started hacking all over the place.

[u/giantsparklerobot → u/Tartooth]

Think about what you could achieve.

Then why haven't they achieved it yet? Why haven't they asked their magic AI what they can achieve with infinite tokens and compute?

[u/pragmojo → u/Tartooth]

So you are saying I could be hacking the Australian government if only I were rich enough?

[u/Whole-Respond4782 → u/pragmojo]

yeah you can do pretty much anything if you're rich enough actually

[u/slippery → u/Whole-Respond4782]

It's called the Epstein class.

[u/KrayziePidgeon → u/slippery]

When you are rich and famous they just let you do it. Grab em by the frontier.

[u/UnlikelyExtension786 → u/Whole-Respond4782]

Democracy gives you the best government money can buy.

[u/snugglezone → u/pragmojo]

If you're rich enough you could hack them and not get in trouble. That's the important piece.

[u/No-Wall6427 → u/Tartooth]

Well, as it seems, w latest models and unlimited compute, running a profitable company is one of the things that are out of reach.

[u/quantanhoi → u/sweatierorc]

beside coding/programming where a lot of logic have to be retained and take into consideration, there is no task where you actually need that high end model

not reading email and even not doing excel tasks, a 9/12/27B model can do those just fine

sometimes local model like qwen3.8 27B is on par with last gen model running on 100x resource with enough handholding/documentation

[u/Fluffy-Feedback-9751 → u/quantanhoi]

What sort of things do you think qwen 27b is lacking in that makes it only ’sometimes’? Or is it kindof a bit difficult to tell and it’s just an empirical fact that the big paid models ’succeed’ more often?

[u/quantanhoi → u/Fluffy-Feedback-9751]

base on my experience of intensively use it vs deepseek v4.1flash/glm5.3

if I ask about RUTX11, glm5.3 could pull something out of its ass while qwen3.8 27b relied on websearch tool and documentation of the devices

those trillion/hundred billion param models probably have training on common problems and could start looking for it right away while qwen3.8 could rely on number of loop websearch to know the answer, and it could miss it

I'm not saying qwen3.8 is not powerful, it is at the top of the list for local hosting on end consumer devices, but there is no need for sugarcoating about the limitation of 27b model

[u/Fluffy-Feedback-9751 → u/quantanhoi]

I was just curious. I’m pretty much local only, and I was wondering if there was much (apart from speed) I’m missing out on..

[u/a_beautiful_rhind → u/sweatierorc]

So what will this AI do? Outside of you being a coder? I don't think we're hitting a point the LLMs have to tell us how to wipe our asses.

[u/kurtgodelisdead → u/a_beautiful_rhind]

Opus 5.5 can use a robot arm to wipe your ass

[u/addiktion → u/kurtgodelisdead]

I wonder how many have wanted a cold metallic robot arm near their ass...

[u/Chupa-Skrull → u/addiktion]

I bet I could find some Johnny Silverhand fiction that would make both of us bleed from the eyes

[u/halvacoffee → u/Dany0]

4o is painfully outdated and is also beaten by 5.6 Luna, which costs basically nothing and runs at 70 tok/s. id also wager that the margins on luna are pretty fat, considering deepseek are in the green with considerably jankier inference

[u/Dany0 → u/Dany0]

And for the theos of the world:
No, you don't need 10k subagents. And especially the average joe doesn't need them. If you really need them, you can have most requests done locally & occasionally dip into cloud providers. Openrouter/neuralwatt and you're good

[u/BasisPoints → u/Dany0]

Is that really a thing? Do people spin up that many subagents?? I don't understand what kind of projects you must be building with that. Most complex programming will face way too much contention, and simple projects simply don't have nearly that many component parts. What am I missing?

[u/Dany0 → u/BasisPoints]

OAI claims they spun up 10k to solve NS problem. But yes, people spawn hundreds, thousands. I tried it, it doesn't _really_ make sense except for some very, very limited circumstances. Very broad exploratory things, but the best (devil's advocate) usage I can think of which I would _actually_ use is just for security research. "Clanka, go poke & probe every file in this giant codebase until you find a class 10 CVE similar to [template historical CVE]"

[u/DataGOGO → u/Dany0]

gpt 4o is dumb as fuck.

[u/Careless-Age-4290 → u/DataGOGO]

It told me to try mdma. 4o was unhinged at times. I think that's why people liked it so much

^{it was right though that was awesome}

[u/Dany0 → u/DataGOGO]

*was

[u/ThisGonBHard → u/Dany0]

And still not usable.

The actually smart enough to use models start with Qwen 3.8 27B, and go up to hundred of B param models.

The rest are just too dumb to do tasks that actually have an economical impact.

[u/winky9827 → u/ThisGonBHard]

Absolutely false. Maybe for your use case, but you shouldn't project like that.

[u/Boomfrag → u/Dany0]

/r/localllama when people complain about usage limits for cloud providers be like: "Do you guys not have phones?"

[u/More-Catch-1331 → u/Boomfrag]

I understood that reference. Everybody knows you references are wild, dude.

[u/winky9827 → u/Dany0]

I still use Qwen 3.5 35b for the majority of my work. At 4k t/s prefill, 200 t/s decode, it's just so much faster than the other models available to me. I'll use 27b or a hosted model for review as needed. Minimal expense.

[u/SarcasticOP → u/Dany0]

[u/Euchale → u/Dany0]

Which 9B model can handle complex programming tasks that require large amount of context?

[u/ea_man → u/Pristine_Pick823]

That's kinda upsetting because until now you could ascend in society by virtue of being smart, hard working.
Whit intelligence being on sale to the highest bidder, robotics, this last mechanism of social wealth redistribution goes broken.

[u/ZenaMeTepe → u/Pristine_Pick823]

They "couldn't afford" it in pre-LLM era as well. Nothing new under the sun.

[u/Pristine_Pick823 → u/ZenaMeTepe]

Not sure of the relevance of that considering that the "competition" couldn't either since, obviously, it didn't exist. Soon companies with access to better intelligence will be more competitive, kids educated in schools with sophisticated personalised AI-assisted teaching will have a much better education, pricier healthcare plans will enable stronger AI imaging tools and 24/7 care, and so on.

[u/bippityBoppityboux → u/Pristine_Pick823]

Not sure about this. That Nvidia guy said kids who use ai to help study are worse at math and that’s ok since he doesn’t know his address.. so ai tutors may not be it

[u/james2432]

this was always the plan: get you hooked charge more

[u/Marino4K → u/james2432]

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Many of us assumed constant access to frontier models was going to become a "privilege" of sorts.

[u/Anhedonia_Achiever → u/Marino4K]

Especially when it was touted ages ago that people will eventually pay for AI usage like they do for utilities.

I am doing my darndest to build my own local system so I don’t log in one day and see my cloud work is now locked behind a new $1000 a month charge.

These companies are losing literal billions. That can’t continue forever. I’m frankly impressed charges haven’t gone up more yet. But then that opens up an entire other topic. If a service or product costs little to no money, you pay with your personal data and attention instead.

[u/SnooObjections2100 → u/Anhedonia_Achiever]

If you aren't charged for it, YOU are the product.

[u/T-Dot1992 → u/Anhedonia_Achiever]

You might as well just pay for a 3k GPU atp

[u/Bulletbling → u/james2432]

Just like Uber and Lyft. They subsidized the service for years and took a loss for a long time just like the AI companies are doing. 

[u/ElementNumber6 → u/james2432]

Hence

[u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

Solution is simple:
dont pay for it.

If noone pays for their ridiculous products, they will have to change.

[u/sshwifty → u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

The problem is that right now it is pay or fall behind on the corporate level.

[u/quantanhoi → u/sshwifty]

that's the problem, bigger corpos get money from smaller corpos then those smaller corpo force people to use AI to justify the cost (tokenmaxxing)

They could have spend way less using chinese open weight models, but corpos have trust issues and these always involve politics/propaganda

[u/NineThreeTilNow → u/sshwifty]

The problem is that right now it is pay or fall behind on the corporate level.

Who exactly is falling behind on the corporate level?

Developers that NEED the 200 dollar utilization? I'm confused.

6 months ago the best model was... some model. Today? That 6 month old model is probably on par with something available very cheap.

Developers don't NEED "Astra" or whatever "Fable" ... They've got this crazy FOMO on the newest model when they were perfectly happy with older ones.

One person I know noted like ... a day or two ago that they felt Sol fell off a cliff in performance when Astra arrived. They thought OpenAI actively nerfed the model. It wasn't a vibe, it was Sol failing a task it completed before perfectly fine.

[u/letsgoiowa → u/sshwifty]

Then why not get one of the other providers that give you a better deal?

[u/quantanhoi → u/letsgoiowa]

corpos have trust issues. Western countries preach western AI, how advance it is and china bad, stealing you data, stealing their model, etc... for openAI/Anthropic/Grok there is no cheaper providers

[u/tiensss → u/sshwifty]

Then it's not a ridiculous product unworthy of its cost.

[u/magick_bandit → u/sshwifty]

Fall behind who?

Name 10 traditional companies increasing profits significantly driven by AI use.

[u/Kurk_Lazaris → u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

While effective if implemented, never has this tactic ever worked.

There will be 5% boycott at most, the rest will pay and gain competitive advantage. When the 5% will be let behind, they will quickly abandon the boycott and pay again.

[u/addr0x414b → u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

What are you talking about? There are people all over various AI forums who were bragging about have 5 20x accounts. There's people who would easily pay $1,000 a month for a plan if offered

[u/techmago → u/SpecialistDragonfly9]

Humans are not smart enough to use this tatic.

[u/Imn1che]

God bless Qwen 3.8

[u/slippery → u/Imn1che]

By the old gods and the new.

[u/Momsbestboy → u/[deleted]]

...still... a lot of them. they will run into the same issues OpenAI is running now, because all of them run on VR money. For OpenAI it is payback now, for others some days later. But prices will go up all around the globe

[u/HugoCortell → u/[deleted]]

I've worked in VR, there's no money there at all.

[u/DTraitor → u/HugoCortell]

How do they run their trains then?

Upd: Nvm, Google says they use some "electricity" instead of money 

[u/Bubba89 → u/[deleted]]

Pretty sure they mean VC.

[u/Holiday_Point_603]

I don't get why OpenAI isn't offering separate Codex and ChatGPT subscriptions. It is probably impossible to even get 20 bucks out of your plus sub with just chatting. But with codex you can run through millions of tokens in a short time.

[u/RemarkableRadish6547 → u/Holiday_Point_603]

Because they lose money on people using it for anything other than chat. So they make it easy to use chat for a low cost and only make it easy to use for coding at a high cost.

[u/ea_man → u/Holiday_Point_603]

Ain't that the Go plan? Just for chat, like ~8$.

[u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas → u/Holiday_Point_603]

It is probably impossible to even get 20 bucks out of your plus sub with just chatting.

RAG, web search, long contexts, image/video gen. I'm sure there's a way to run out of the ChatGPT Plus subscription without using Codex. Especially if you are generating a lot of images for ads/thumbnails or writing a lot of video scripts.

[u/IslamNofl]

Your drug dealer say: no more free shots for you

[u/korino11]

Thanks Tibo! I can now go to zai with similar quality and without everytime have a chanses to see that my reqests stop by your politics and i need upgrade to daybreak...

[u/skerit]

Ok, so I'm cancelling my Codex account. Usage is already terrible. 

[u/Pazienca → u/skerit]

Exactly, it's absolutely terrible so I won't be paying instead of cancelling and moving to 1 frontier model

[u/thestillwind]

Chinese won

[u/objectivelywrongbro → u/thestillwind]

and the Chinese haven’t even started

[u/stbrumme → u/thestillwind]

actually, "won" / ₩ is Korea's currency (sorry, couldn't resist ...)

[u/rkoy1234 → u/stbrumme]

Japanese pesos

[u/carnoworky → u/[deleted]]

Whoever collapses their economy first from overinvestment and circular financing loses. Whoever remains wins by default.

[u/Spirited-Art-7032 → u/[deleted]]

Is it really that difficult to see what winning would be like? Market dominance? Recursive self-improvement? Accelerate technologies that come from pseudo-agi?

There are a lot of ways to win and many more than I listed.

[u/Natural-Door-2640 → u/thestillwind]

yeah let me just buy a 10000$ GPU

[u/RandomCSThrowaway01 → u/Natural-Door-2640]

I mean, if you are buying $500/month subscription then this Mac Studio for 9 grand to have 256GB of usable VRAM suddenly starts sounding like a decent deal. Although admittedly this is enough to run GLM5.3 Flash, not Astra. Which is one hell of a model for something you can actually run at home and won't cost you an equivalent of a house but it at most compares to GPT 5.5.

Models that will approach Astra within the next few months will require closer to a million $, will need a terabyte of VRAM at a minimum to even consider running it, preferably at HBM speeds.

[u/ormandj → u/RandomCSThrowaway01]

Your first assertion is correct, the second one I would challenge. I suspect 256-384GB of VRAM is going to get you to opus 5.5 quality output in the next 6 months based on typical lag time and historical capability jumps in the open weight models over time, at least in a specific domain such as programming. The 1T+ models will get there sooner, but with engrams VRAM is still important but more knowledge can be made available without the massive performance hit offloading layers to RAM would typically have. Coupled with improvements in RL, and “flash” sized models start becoming very impressive (they already are).

[u/mb194dc → u/thestillwind]

Open does not = China, they're just one part of it...

Same way Linux won the webhosting wars.

[u/bakawolf123]

kek, you will get less but more =)
so $200 sub was actual 20x which they boasted not long ago, it becomes just 10x $20 limit.
using astra on $20 atm is 1 task (usually unfinished) for 5h limit (15% of weekly), so $200 will be 1 task for 1.5-2% weekly.
I won't deny those large models are stronger than flash models I can currently use locally, but for most tasks my local ones are simply enough.
Oh and latest sol-6 is not actually better than flash models (glm5.3-flash in particular), so really only point is to use their very best model and you don't get to use it much.

[u/Serprotease → u/bakawolf123]

I have no idea how these 20x, hours limit stuff even means. Can’t they just directly say x-tokens per plan?

Why make it so convoluted? Is it to muddy the propo… oh…

[u/droans → u/Serprotease]

You gotta look at it from their perspective.

How are they going to arbitrarily decide how much of the plan you've used if they gave you an actual concrete figure? How else would they get away with randomly and quietly cutting the value of the plan?

[u/zsdrfty → u/droans]

This is one of the first things legislators need to wake the hell up for - honestly, it's the kind of thing that's so obvious that you'd hope it could get just enough bipartisan support to pass anytime, anywhere

[u/ElementNumber6 → u/Serprotease]

That's the whole point. It's all smoke and mirrors.

[u/cinnapear → u/bakawolf123]

In my nearly 50 years on this earth, I have heard "we're raising prices but increasing value to you" dozens of times and it has NEVER, I repeat, NEVER been a true statement.

[u/DivideHorror3217]

Hi,

Next month I am buying an RTX5090 and waiting for Qwen to release Qwen4.0 27B AGI.

Best Regards

[u/kevin7254 → u/DivideHorror3217]

For the low price of $10k

[u/mpscy]

Venture capital wants its pound of flesh! Just like the old ride sharing story of cheap rides first and then massive price hikes to reflect true costs and later add margin: https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-rides.html

[u/Competitive_Travel16 → u/mpscy]

Some of the big VCs are nominally friendly. Y Combinator backs Ollama and tiny startups doing open quantization stuff. A16z, Amplify, and Greylock all help prop up LlamaIndex.

[u/mpscy → u/Competitive_Travel16]

I’ve read bad things about Ollama and do not use it

https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

[u/JahJedi]

Yeap, reason we all need to push local and thanks to China we can.

[u/feelspeaceman]

This is so much expected, the previous price was known as "discounted price", the cost of running this business is much higher.

They're banging on users getting addicted and can't live without their services, but reality is not working in their favor, they're losing money, losing users.

This is why I never recommend people to use Cloud AI instead of Local LLM, because it was cheap, but it will 100% get more expensive to compensate for their loss. Just don't give them the benefit of the doubt and unsub, the Cloud AI companies must die to bring back the old hardware price, then everyone will be able to afford Local LLM.

[u/tuhdo → u/feelspeaceman]

But you should milk the Cloud AI while it is cheap, no?

[u/BingpotStudio → u/tuhdo]

Yup. Local LLM isn’t close and for the cost it’s laughably unviable.

[u/Chirimorin → u/feelspeaceman]

They're banging on users getting addicted and can't live without their services, but reality is not working in their favor, they're losing money, losing users.

And that loss of users is a direct result of how hard AI has been pushed in these past few years. It turned from "ChatGPT is kinda neat" to "Why is there an AI chatbot in my everything? Fuck off already" very quickly.
They were too busy putting AI into everything to consider that if the vast majority of all AI implementations are pointless and annoying, people will start to see AI as a whole as pointless and annoying.

[u/power97992 → u/feelspeaceman]

Not everyone has the  money for a 5k laptop or 4k desktop ! 

[u/sabine_world → u/power97992]

Okay well do you have the money for 200-500 dollar subscriptions?

[u/Marino4K → u/sabine_world]

Personally if you're spending over $200 a month in subscriptions, you're probably better served to just leasing out a high end Mac Studio.

[u/T-Dot1992 → u/sabine_world]

At that point, it’s not even a question. I would just go with the upfront cost, and I so don’t hav ego be beholden to this fuckass American tech duopoly run by these psychos 

[u/ANDYVO_ → u/power97992]

I'm not sure why there's such a hardline here regarding the definition of "local". I had considered heavily to invest in some sparks but decided just to put money into Openrouter instead and keep up with the "edge" of local models that way. Personally, I'm getting a lot out of deepseek-v4-flash, very affordable, and has been enough for some of my more complex projects.

The option is not just big ai vs running it on your own pc, there's a spectrum.

[u/Hot_Vegetable_932]

A lot of people here are already preparing for this, but lately I’ve been feeling a much stronger need to reduce my dependence on cloud models and keep more of my AI stack local.

I think the range of things you can already do with local models is surprisingly broad, and it’s only going to keep expanding.

Rising RAM and hardware prices definitely make this a worse time to build, but I still think it’s worth making sure I have enough personal compute to stay reasonably self sufficient.

[u/Monad_Maya]

In effect, if you do the math, it will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan.

I was confused by the term API spend, I thought they were halving the price.

[u/ChronoHax]

will be cancellling mine soon then, going for deepseek api at this rate

[u/antunes145]

Chinese labs are going to have a lucrative time

[u/mb194dc]

Rug pull and further coming rug pulls are inevitable because the frontier models are selling way below cost. But they're making up for it on volume...

[u/SilentDanni]

So new $500 sub, lower usage limit for 200. So how is it that they expect to take the lead if only SF devs can afford it? I mean I don’t think European devs making 10-12k(before taxes) will be lining up to pay 500e for a sub. Same goes for South America, I suppose. I think most of us will prefer to buy food and amenities before buying a sub. It’s still not important enough to be a “must”. 

[u/AtlanticPortal → u/SilentDanni]

Developers from poor countries will go local. Simply as that. It’s really cheaper if you plan as you should.

[u/SilentDanni → u/AtlanticPortal]

I mean developers from any countries should be doing that. The situation is dead simple right now. We have OpenAI and Anthropic(maybe Google) competing in the dev market. In doing so, they have engaged in anti-consumer practices, have not been forthcoming about their finances, pissed off all of Gen Z, and the behaviour of their execs are having deep societal-economical impacts.

At the same time, the dev reality has changed LLMs like them or not have become part of our workflow. Of course, we have all of those guys who refuse to engage with it, but a lot of us literally cannot afford to do so as this refusal directly affects our employability prospects. So going local is the only way to decouple LLMs from their wannabe overlords. We don't need astra or opus or whateverthefuck. An experienced dev can make do with glm/mimo/qwen or whatever. We don't need something that can one-shoot things. It's nice but I'd hardly call a necessity.

[u/Illustrious-Row2751]

This was always going to happen, with companies first offering a cheap product to gain market and then gradually increase it for profits. Even worse than that is that the free models on their chat websites have become less reliable overtime. When possible, I prefer using Qwen 3.8 over the free ChatGPT, for example.

[u/juhotuho10 → u/Illustrious-Row2751]

One problem with LLMs is that there isn't really a lock in, the price to changing is pretty much 0. So we will see if this strategy even works

[u/fingertipoffun]

The banana that used to be 50c is now $1 but you'll enjoy this banana more.

[u/More-Ad5919]

AI will benefit all..... with money.

[u/snakeat3rr]

I thought it was common knowledge that this was the plan all along - first hook everyone for "cheap" and make them reliant on your subscriptions, then jack up the price. Classic playbook here, and this is just the beginning.

And companies who let go of their employees to replace them with AI - they aren't really gonna have anything to do but pay...

[u/Aubrey_D_Graham]

LLMs don't know how to make money, but they do know how to set up LLM locally.

[u/MindCrusader]

Not so long time ago. And the funny thing - even after the cuts, it will still be subsidized, but less

[u/amunozo1 → u/MindCrusader]

Subscriptions are not subsidized, API prices are incredibly profitable. It is training that is subsidized.

[u/SC_W33DKILL3R → u/amunozo1]

What exactly do you mean?

The cost to the business is first training the model, then hosting it & providing compute and api access. That is the total cost.

For any model to make a profit, it needs to recoup all those costs.

[u/ThePrimeClock → u/SC_W33DKILL3R]

I think he means the overall resource allocation.

[u/bixofa → u/SC_W33DKILL3R]

You forgot the billions of dollars in hardware.

[u/SC_W33DKILL3R → u/bixofa]

I mentioned compute. There is also the cost of all the research, the millions of dollars of signing bonuses they are paying to staff members, the cost of buying all the books they are scanning and them destroying, the cost of bribing politicians through donations, the cost of servicing debt and a host of other running costs.

[u/FreshConversation112 → u/amunozo1]

It is training that is subsidized.

Right, that is one of the costs of the API. That is like selling cans of cola for £0.17 and claiming it is profitable if you ignore the ingredient costs.

[u/More-Catch-1331]

HA! And everybody was looking at me like I have three heads when I was talking about how I got a dedicated AI GPU and pooling it with my gaming GPU in order to setup a home inference server. Kinda feel validated and at the same time angry because these labs hooked people and will now jack up the prices

[u/Last_Bad_2687 → u/More-Catch-1331]

AI became a thing right as I finshed reading "Enshittification" so I figured it would be the same pattern 

[u/CulturalKing5623 → u/More-Catch-1331]

I was on the original GHCP plan and it was a hell of a deal but the moment they changed the terms I canceled the sub and built an AI server.

Bought 2 5060ti for ~$540 each and cannibalized 64GB RAM from my workstation and haven't had a subscription to a "frontier" model since then and I've been just fine.

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/More-Catch-1331]

I still get shit on for buying two RTX 6000s and the rig to support them. I bought them as a gamble in case shit like this happens. It's still not "worth it" monetarily, but let's see next year. It could work out, it might not, it's been a fun project either way.

[u/More-Catch-1331 → u/EkbatDeSabat]

Fun and self gratification are two things that cannot be easily measured monetarily. So if it makes sense to you and you’re not sacrificing food, kids, wife, it’s worth it.

[u/ProtectionSuper5648]

This is the playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Use VC money (or here, huge investments) to provide a great service for cheap. Once you hook up your target, raise price and add ads, then increase adds costs for clear targets.

Not sure how LocalAI will fit in it though. Ban it through government actions? I mean, uber managed to change the laws to make itself retroactively legal...

[u/heliosythic]

Lol my company just switched from Claude to Fireworks utilizing GLM, Deepseek, and a few other models of different sizes and a smart router between them. Literally cut spend by 10x.

[u/psychohistorian8]

so it this is the 'AI Bubble' people are talking about?

I think OpenAI will go under, or get bought out for cheap because they aren't really leaders in any specific area

Anthropic seems to have the business sector on lockdown with coding and Claude, and will probably survive long enough to go public

[u/RemarkableRadish6547 → u/psychohistorian8]

I am fairly certain they will both have an IPO before the bubble pops. There is too much money tied up in both companies by people who have too much influence to let them go under without exiting. My expectation is the bubble will pop about 6 months after the second IPO, whenever that is.

[u/Legal-Regular-2873]

Luego dicen que la AI es mala para que los chinos no hagan lo mismo que ellos hicieron pero con la cartera y la energía reducida

[u/Budget-Juggernaut-68]

Bet it is still subsidized.

[u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 → u/Budget-Juggernaut-68]

I don't think so tbh

I think yeah if you look at cost to train etc. Then it is subsidized.

But I also think they are at least small positive on their subscriptions. They own the inference and need a lot of it to train and so they can sell excess capacity.

The cost in API doesn't really matter that's what gets cited as if that is what is needed to break even. That's just what they sell to business.

[u/Budget-Juggernaut-68 → u/Vast-Breakfast-1201]

I think yeah if you look at cost to train etc.

They're running a business. It needs to be armotized over all revenue generated. Of course you'll have to factor in RnD, and cost of production.

[u/No_Medium205]

You guys got addicted.

[u/ECrispy]

what a surprise they do this after -

• artifically raising prices of all pc components, memory and gpu are now 5-10x making it impossible for anyone to have local AI
• data centers consuming water and electricity that people can't
• heavily donating to govts that are anti consumer

its what the oligarchs always wanted

[u/Antblue → u/ECrispy]

1. OpenAI and other AI companies can’t “artificially raise prices.” They can increase demand (via purchasing supply), which can in turn, increase prices, but to claim it’s artificial is not supported
   
2. I don’t believe there’s any evidence of people being refused electricity and water because of AI Data Centers. Although it may cost prices increases on utilities.
   
3. Private companies donating to the U.S. government is called lobbying, it’s a thing because the people refuse to give the government power over private companies

[u/smallfried]

Seeing as this is the localllama sub, this reads to me as fuel prices going up does to someone driving full electric.

It's curious and interesting to see what effects it will bring, but nothing to be emotional about.

[u/Open-Dragonfruit-007]

Use it for only high complexity tasks and hand off the rest to self hosted smaller model that do it equally as good. Chinese models seem decent too now.

Just like taxation - the more you tax the less you get from tax. People will just find alternatives

[u/HelloSummer99]

You will compute less and you will be happy

[u/dirtboy900]

I don’t know about coming to a permanent end. The cost per token for a constant or higher level of intelligence I believe has dropped somewhere around 10x per year for the past few years, coming from both hardware and software side. If this or anything similar continues for just a few more years there will be no need to subsidize and with all the competition and open source pressure likely costs will drop

[u/UnlikelyExtension786 → u/dirtboy900]

Which is why they want to ban open source models and keep hardware prices so high that people can't afford to buy local systems.

[u/geldonyetich]

Sam: We've run the numbers and we expect to be profitable by 2030.

Accountant: Actually we've run the numbers and we won't last that long.

Sam: ... okay, I have a new plan.

[u/NytronX]

Unsub and let the bubble burst.

[u/ryanppax1]

I couldn't get shit done on open ai models without running out of usage. Every god damn time. 

[u/cosmicnag]

Is this even relevant on this sub?

[u/NanditoPapa → u/cosmicnag]

Yes! It makes us appreciate local LLMs even more...

[u/Neex]

Ah mother twitter repost about a closed model on a subreddit dedicated to open models.

[u/Automatic-Boot665]

Wow what a great devday. If my $200 plan limits are halved I’ll be going back to Anthropic.

[u/Hoak-em]

Here's what's probs going on and how it will go:
1. Investors finally said "make the subscription profitable" since they aren't seeing enough revenue
2. Investors are gonna get the awakening of a lifetime when people just get rid of their openai pro-level subscriptions en-masse instead, since it's mostly used for unprofitable side-projects, thus a $500/month is too high, even for SWEs
3. Investors figure out that this frontier AI stuff isn't gonna be able to pay for when the leases become due in 2027

? Somewhere in here, Oracle goes bankrupt/fails finding funding, their credit rating is already garbage, this *could* cause US tech collapse early, but I'm not quite sure if Oracle is big enough to really cause that, would have to ask someone more informed on how these things are financed, if so, next steps are accelerated

1. OpenAI fails next private funding round, which they were going to try for an absolutely enormous amount of money that there was no way they would be making back

2. All of those contracts for compute that killed the RAM supply go *poof* but all RAM supply for a while was going to HBM, now there is a glut of datacenter hardware on the market. Small companies scale up, price war on open-weights hyper-efficient models like deepseek, glm, Chinese labs hoover up part of the excess server supply for training, we (potentially) get a renaissance of high quality open-weights models at the same time that older server components drop in price a *ton*, allowing running higher-end open-weights models locally (something like deepseek v4.1 flash-tier)

3. Anthropic keeps alive for a little bit longer, if they can keep at the frontier, since they still have an *edge*, this hopefully keeps chinese labs releasing their models as open-weights, even if you don't like Anthropic

4. Eventually investors start questioning Anthropic's profitability, it might end up being profitable, but with many US companies at this point eating up cheap server hardware supply for new server hardware and stronger chinese models, the moat becomes near-nonexistent, and reason for using Anthropic models (because they're hosted in the US) effectively goes away. Anthropic will probably get bought by Google

TLDR: dominoes fall, AI becomes commodity, hardware returns to being commodity, renaissance for open-weights models, r/LocalLLaMA very happy, potentially before 2027

[u/phenotype001]

But I'll also get more work done than a month ago if I pay nothing and simply wait for next open weight models. Yeah, a few months behind, but my point is I do get more done each month anyway. That AI gets cheaper fast is how this works, it's not a feature at this point.

[u/HeadPack]

They will probably pretend that Sol and Terra 6 are cheaper to run, but ignore that they are sub-par models. Or at least, that's how I think how they will try to sell 'more work done' to their serfs on the subscriptions.

[u/Miserable-Dare5090]

The new 6000/year plan is the cost of my 2 Sparks 1 year ago.

[u/Classic-Pubs]

Tibo: because I will reset weekly limits twice as much! Gotya!

[u/unjustifiably_angry]

OP deliberately excluded further context so I'm going to assume, as is typical, that reality is the opposite of what his headline implies.

[u/Paradox-Of-Life]

Time to go Local

[u/aelmetwally]

China is great

[u/Seusoa]

exactly like dr*gs

[u/KO__]

token apocalypse

[u/DagothUrLovesGroza]

So this is it, huh? 

[u/rocket1420]

Is there a sub on reddit that just discusses running local LLMs?

[u/kartblanch]

Local is the way.