In order to justify higher prices the SotA needs to have way higher capabilities than the competition (hence justifying the price) and at the same time the competition needs to be way below a certain threshold. Once that threshold becomes "good enough for task x", the higher price doesn't make sense anymore.
While there is some provider retention today, it will be harder to have once everyone offers kinda sorta the same capabilities. Changing an API provider might even be transparent for most users and they wouldn't care.
If you want to have an idea about token prices today you can check the median for serving open models on openrouter or similar platforms. You'll get a "napkin math" estimate for what it costs to serve a model of a certain size today. As long as models don't go oom higher than today's largest models, API pricing seems in line with a modest profit (so it shouldn't be subsidised, and it should drop with tech progress). Another benefit for open models is that once they're released, that capability remains there. The models can't get "worse".
This just isn't going to happen, we have open weights models which we can roughly calculate how much they cost to run that are on the level of Sonnet _right now_. The best open weights models used to be 2 generations behind, then they were 1 generation behind, now they're on par with the mid-tier frontier models. You can choose among many different Kimi K2.5 providers. If you believe that every single one of those is running at 50% subsidies, be my guest.
The political climate won't allow that to happen. The US will do everything to stay ahead of China, and a rise in prices means a sizeable migration to Chinese models, giving them that much more data to improve their models and pass the US in AI capability (if they haven't already).
But also it'll happen in a way, as eventually models will become optimized enough that run cost become more or less negligible from a sustainability perspective.