There is no what if. The consumers haven't opened their wallets (in time for these companies to survive).
Ad revenue dwarfs any number that consumer dollars could put up. ChatGPT has been a household name for years, Copilot bloatware is shoved into every Office subscription on earth, and it still runs deep in the red. Ads are the only way.
What if they considered that and determined that at typical consumer SaaS pricing of low tens of dollars per user per month it's "still impossible to make money"? What if they went a step further and looked at typical Enterprise SaaS pricing (low hundreds of dollars per seat per month) and determined "still can't make money"?