That is not, in fact, "well known", but based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work and at least look like they're soliciting a constant firehose of investment money simply to keep the lights on. In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before it actually, you know, recurs.
I mean sure, it's self reported.
But the inference prices somewhere like Fireworks or TogetherAI charges is comparable to what Google/AWS/Azure charge for the same model an we know they aren't losing money - they have public accounts that show it, eg:
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-resets-amazon-...
Fireworks’ gross margin—gross profit as a percentage of revenue—is roughly 50%, according to the same person
https://archive.is/Y26lA#selection-1249.65-1249.173
> In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before it actually, you know, recurs.
If someone has a subscription then yes that is pretty normal.
Not if you've substantively changed rate limits 3 times in the last 5 months while still counting those forecast revenues. In most industries that's called rug-pulling.