> They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:
The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools.
It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is.
There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.
> There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.
Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.
I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.
"We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model.
Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them.
Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.
The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools.
It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is.
There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.