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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

imho those prices are artificially deflated to serve as a loss leader. Either subscription cost goes up or some other model such as advertising fills the gap.

I don't really understand the argument being made here. The best models are better, but they're not that much better. If I'm paying only 20% as much for 20% less performance, I can make up the 20% and have abundant cash or compute left over to spare.

The other thing that matters to me is the tooling. I could use Deepseek Harness with Claude but I'd rather support the same people that brought me DSH.

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> imho those prices are artificially deflated to serve as a loss leader.

As a consumer I don’t care. The price I pay is how much it costs.

I’ve been hearing arguments that they could increase the price at any time. For years.

Instead the opposite has happened: A $20/month subscription has become more capable than it was 6 months or a year ago, by a huge margin. I can get so much done within a day of the $20/month subscription that it’s hard to believe it’s so cheap.

I mean no one should expect them to increase the price in the growth phase where money doesn't matter. Post-IPO when growth has a declining rate, they will (hopefully) have some lock in and blast prices as much as the market will bear.

Hardware will get faster. Models will get better.

By the time they reach this point of raising prices, if they ever do, the cost of models with current intelligence levels is going to fall a lot.

So all of these arguments about buying hardware now and switching to open models now to prepare for future price increases are still wrong if they’re argued on the basis of being locked out of cloud intelligence costs.

The cost for a given unit of intelligence is only going to decrease.

That's wishful thinking IMO. Hardware hasn't been improving at a rapid rate and clearly these companies are losing money and burning investor cash at a ridiculous rate. The party has to stop eventually. The price will go up. I expect everyone will have to pay API rates eventually, possibly even higher API rates than the current ones.

> Hardware hasn't been improving at a rapid rate

Yes it has. GPUs and consumer hardware today is much faster than it was 5 years ago and it will be much faster again in 5 years.

> and clearly these companies are losing money and burning investor cash at a ridiculous rate

As every startup should.

The inference is not losing money. I don’t know if you missed it, but it was revealed a while ago that they’re actually making decent money on inference.

So they will stop training new models? Also to refinance their gigantic debt (non-cancelable commitments) they will NEED to make more profit.

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