I don’t assume this at all. In fact, the opposite has been happening in my experience: I try multiple providers at the same time and the $20/month plans have only been getting better with the model improvements and changes. The current ChatGPT $20/month plan goes a very long way even when I set it to “Extra High” whereas just 6 months ago I felt like the $20/month plans from major providers were an exercise in bouncing off rate limits for anything non-trivial.
Inference costs are only going to go down from here and models will only improve. I’ve been reading these warnings about the coming demise of AI plans for 1-2 years now, but the opposite keeps happening.
This time also crosses over with the frontier labs raising ever larger and larger rounds. If Anthropic IPO (which I honestly doubt), then we may get a better sense of actual prices in the market, as it's unlikely the markets will continue letting them spend more and more money each year without a return.
It sure does and Codex is great, but do you think they'll maintain the current prices after/if it eventually dominates Claude Code in terms of marketshare and mindshare?
Unlike Uber and Lyft, the price of inference continues to go down as datacenter capacity comes online and compute hardware gets more powerful.
So I think we'll always have affordable LLM services.
I do think the obsession with prices of the entry-level plans is a little odd. $20/month is nothing relative to the salaries people using these tools receive. HN is full of warnings that prices are going to go up in the future, but what's that going to change for software developers? Okay, so my $20/month plan goes to $40/month? $60/month? That's still less than I pay for internet access at home.