The card in question here had an initial MSRP of $1600. It's been bumped up by the market, probably because it turned out it's nice for things like this, but it's hardly in the 99% can't afford domain, especially if you're using it to replace a never-ending rent at which point it will pay for itself very rapidly, especially for heavy LLM users.

In any case, we've gone from requiring supercomputers, to requiring very high end computers, to requiring $1600 video cards. It's tracking the exact same path that image rendering systems took (which if you haven't been keeping up there, now run excellently on pretty much any plain old computer), and we'll probably be there within a couple of years if not much sooner.