Pricing is dropping quick. Inference is so cheap, I think they are losing a lot less money selling subscriptions than you think. It might even be more expensive managing the load, than actually selling the tokens at subscription prices.
We are seeing with OpenAI, allegedly through their new pricing scheme, as intelligence and model efficiency increases they offer the same throughput while advertising 1/2 as much usage, letting Astra consume more usage, essentially only being available to those wealthy enough to afford it while still offering essentially unlimited Sol and Luna to their subscription tiers.
Also if you're cache hit rate is high enough a billion tokens tokens from Deepseek 4.1 Flash costs less than $15.
If you compare the cost to the price of dinner or whatever else you spend disposable income on, it can seem high but if you compare the cost to employing an engineer (don’t forget costs for payroll taxes, office space and equipment, etc) and consider the fact that the models often seem to be much faster than even expert humans, the costs don’t seem so terrible.
I’m on the $100/month subscription; this session took about $500 in token-equivalent costs.
(Note that it wasn’t all Opus 5.5; I have a setup that uses Fable 5.1 as an advisor, Sonnet 5.5 for mechanical changes, etc.)
God I hope the prices drop quick. Once they stop subsidizing it these kinds of workflows will be unaffordable for anyone who isn't already wealthy
An insane amount of compute manufacturing comes online in 2028. Compute is a commodity. It's not going to stay expensive for long.
Assuming this isn't some toy CI a 60% drop in billable minutes will make $500 back pretty quick. Github is wildly expensive.
They have dropped, in Chinese models.
Pricing is dropping quick. Inference is so cheap, I think they are losing a lot less money selling subscriptions than you think. It might even be more expensive managing the load, than actually selling the tokens at subscription prices.
We are seeing with OpenAI, allegedly through their new pricing scheme, as intelligence and model efficiency increases they offer the same throughput while advertising 1/2 as much usage, letting Astra consume more usage, essentially only being available to those wealthy enough to afford it while still offering essentially unlimited Sol and Luna to their subscription tiers.
Also if you're cache hit rate is high enough a billion tokens tokens from Deepseek 4.1 Flash costs less than $15.
Subsidies are a lie planted by Misanthropic and ClosedAI to milk their users and let them think it's the other way round.
Inference is highly profitable business, even for third parties with much less resources and expertise.
Does it resume automatically on higher subscriptions?
I'm on a $20 plan and it never auto resumes. I have to go back in and type out resume or click a button.
Instruct it to arm a monitor (every hour or so) to wake him up in case of quota or api issue.
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If you compare the cost to the price of dinner or whatever else you spend disposable income on, it can seem high but if you compare the cost to employing an engineer (don’t forget costs for payroll taxes, office space and equipment, etc) and consider the fact that the models often seem to be much faster than even expert humans, the costs don’t seem so terrible.