Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.
As someone from just such a country, DeepSeek 0731 was the first time I seriously started using an LLM for coding. All previous attempts were useless or ridiculously expensive.
Can't say the old prices felt "free", but it was affordable if you're careful with your cache hit rate.
The new pricing probably pushed it into the unaffordable territory for tasks where you can do without it. Probably will try opencode go if they don't also follow suite, or will have to go back to wetware.
You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.
They are hoarding HW at massive scale, they make it harder and more expensive to own
Just because you are fine with the new price doesn't mean it's not a problem
Perhaps it's time to pop this bubble