Comment by maxdo

I'm so tired of this shallow analysis claiming vendors are losing tons of money on subscriptions. How do you even judge that?

Users go on vacation, they slack off, they spend the day talking to each other. There are very few people who are really effective at burning tokens. how do you know the ratio? do you have insides? No :)

The biggest target is enterprise, and the economics for an LLM vendor look like this: price per token = R&D + inference + infra investments. When you buy a subscription, you are quite often buying a year ahead. That lets the vendor predict future infra investments against hard commitments, and sell expensive per token pricing to everyone else. And when a hard commitment sits unused because the user is busy, they sell it twice. It is loyalty in exchange for predictability, in exchange for the promise to always deliver SOTA to users.

Vendors control the harness. Tomorrow they simply roll out a router where reading the code and doing the final edits goes to a cheaper model, and their math suddenly becomes very sexy.

Isn't that hard to predict that their economic model is very easy to tune? and this is just first baby steps.

I personally pay per token ( do not have subs for work ). I did have once a $25k/mo worth of tokens, since i knew it was free so i was doing crazy experiments. Now , 2 month later, my bill was barely $1.5k since i moved into different stage with project. I do have team members who burn $500-600. pre router, pre optimization.

I switched recently to grok 4.5 and cursor router and my bill will go even further down. It rotates 4-5 different vendor models cheap and expensive too, depends on the task. Routers will flip entire LLM economy upside down.