Comment by mark_l_watson

The open models are sometimes competitive with foundation models. The costs of Z.ai’s monthly plans just increased a bit, but still inexpensive compared to Google/Anthropic/OpenAI.

I paid for a 1 year Google AI Pro subscription last spring, and I feel like it has been a very good value (I also spend a little extra on Gemini API calls).

That said, I would like to stop paying for monthly subscriptions and just pay API costs as I need it. Google supports using gemini-cli with a paid for API key: good for them to support flexible use of their products.

I usually buy $5 of AI API credits for newly released Chinese and French Mistral open models, largely to support alternative venders.

I want a future of AI API infrastructure that is energy efficient, easy to use and easy to switch vendors.

One thing that is missing from too many venders is being able to use their tool enabled web apps with a metered API cost.

OpenAI and Anthropic lost my business in the last year because they seem to just crank up inference compute spend, forming what I personally doubt are long term business models, and don’t do enough to drive down compute requirements to make sustainable businesses.