Comment by 4d4m
1 month ago
Thanks. This is a widely misunderstood part of the market that the frontier companies are either unaware of, or don't see as a threat. Consumers are flocking to this, its better than dealing with their limits, changes, and opaque pricing. Funny enough, frontier companies are literally training their users to seek alternatives, local models, and distilled models to meet their throughput needs.
It’s not that they don’t understand that it’s a problem, it’s just that the easy way to address it is with reduced, flat-rate pricing… but they are already losing gobs of cash on their regular users. Their business model, as it stands, is not sustainable. That’s not saying they won’t find a stable one, but the one they have now is definitely not. The external cash is drying up, and they need to figure out a way to shed the low-revenue users, and charge the remaining users a lot more or they’re going to go under. They would probably do a goddamned backflip if every flat rate user that wasn’t willing to switch to API pricing went local, or even better, went with a competitor.