Yes, either US AI corps reduce the cost of their top tier personal subscriptions down to what people are already paying for other expensive personal apps (e.g. Adobe), so ~$50-100, or open weights are going to eat their lunch very quickly. We're not there yet, as current hardware doesn't allow you to do things like multiple parallel agents, but we'll get there soon enough.

$500 for the old $200 is definitely a fumble.

> People said the same about $200 a month

This is missing an important context. And I actually remember this well, because I was saying that too. And the reason I was saying is that $200 plan didn't come with API usage, it was a chat plan.

It made no sense up until they started including API usage. Just as $500 makes no sense now.

> costs going to 10% of white collar income.

There's a permanent and ever lowering ceiling maintained by open weight models. It makes no sense to justify paying 10% of income permanently for something that will get you unlimited local inference for a 6 month subscription cost.