this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
204 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
85438 readers
4852 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
$14000 in API pricing is not $14000 in costs, though. Costs are hard to calculate because of the huge capital outlays and unknowns about hardware lifecycles, various business deals, and limited public knowledge.
It's likely that inference costs for good-enough models will go down over time. China's API pricing tells us the direction already. Energy costs will be a driving factor in the west, I guess.
So.. they are almost certainly subsidizing plans right now, but on average, it won't be by sooo much. Your average ChatGPT user will hardly use Codex, for example. Your average developer is not token-maxxing either.
Why are they subsidizing plans? To build a sticky customer base ... which means they want you to stick to their tools - their coding agents/harnesses, their integrations, etc. Models are/will be increasingly interchangeable, so they are building sticky ecosystems instead.
I've seen a datapoint that an 8 hour business day with Claude is about 1 kUSD, so 20 business day month is some 20 kUSD. More with agentic AI.