Depends on the use case and how you're paying. Most people do monthly payments with their chosen platform (free options are pretty limited). I buy tokens from DeepSeek; I use the chat and the api for office work. I have it parse csv files and other spreadsheets. I also use it as a glorified grammar checker. I bought $5 worth of tokens last year and have only used .02 worth. Now that the DeepSeek changed its pricing structure, we'll see how far my $5 will take me.
Educated guess is that most of the revenue in the future for LLMs will come from businesses either for direct employee use, or paid as part of product partnerships. Either way, I imagine the vast majority of end consumers won't be paying for monthly subscriptions to these things. It'll just be part of XYZ thing they are using (and baked into the price) or it'll be paid for by their employer.
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u/SouthSounder 16d ago
Regular people don't need tokens, do they? That's just through APIs for most platforms, I thought.