$20/day x 250 days per year x # devs/agents/etc = $$$. About $5k per dev at that daily use case.

Enough to validate repurposing an existing workstation with enough RAM, or finding a used high VRAM GPU, or in my case buying a Strix Halo system for home lab and local models.

The future is once again not cloud based, for AI tools.

Most people are running a whole lot less than $20's worth of tokens per day on cloud platforms. (Is that assuming a frontier model? 1M output tokens per day?) Local hardware could easily take up that workload, at least the part of it that's non-time-critical.

The advertising future looks like that to me, too. Service proxies like OpenRouter might talk about price optimization, maybe some ad filtering. But I expect proxies will have malicious entries, too, surreptitiously altering agentic prompts.

Ads are usually the workaround where you don’t deliver enough value to get people to subscribe or payments are unavailable for some reason.

It makes sense to show some ads and get some money at low volume (like a faraway reader wanting to read a story in your local newspaper) but taking money from regular users directly will pay much more.

Newspapers are happy to cannibalize 99% of their ad revenue with a paywall if that 1% subscribes because that’s how much more money you make from someone paying $10-$20/month vs ads.

But yeah, if people use it as a buying recommendation engine, that’s where the money is on ads/referrals but a lot of AI use has little/no connection to buying intent touchpoints.