As company owner the math is simple:

If I pay $3k/month to a developer and a $200/month tool makes them 10% more productive I will pay it without thinking.

Not saying $200/mo isn't a lot, but I think you're underestimating used car payments these days. The average US used car payment is above $500 now.

I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)

If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.

That's one of 3 possible futures.

1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.

2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.

3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.

I could write an essay about how almost everything you wrote either is extremely incorrect or is extremely likely to be incorrect. I am too lazy to, though, so I will just have to wait for another commenter to do the equivalent.

If you can’t get $200 of value out of Claude Code Max, then you need to really step up your game. That’s user error.