[Night_Thastus]

This is entirely expected. The low prices of using LLMs early on was totally and completely unsustainable. The companies providing such services were (and still are) burning money by the truckload.

The hope is to get a big userbase who eventually become dependent on it for their workflow, then crank up the price until it finally becomes profitable.

The price for all models by all companies will continue to go up, and quickly.

[oezi]

I recently looked at this a bit but came away with the impression that at least on API pricing the models should be very profitable considering primarily the electricity cost.

Subscriptions and free plans are the thing that can easily burn money.

[Night_Thastus]

The physical buildouts and massive R+D spending is the big part.

[viktorcode]

> This is entirely expected. The low prices of using LLMs early on was totally and completely unsustainable.

Do you think this is true for DeepSeek as well?

[Night_Thastus]

Depends on the level of interest the state takes in it. But I would wager yes, it's unsustainable currently.

[subhobroto]

> The price for all models by all companies will continue to go up, and quickly.

This might entirely be true but I'm hoping that's because the frontier models are just actually more expensive to run as well.

Said another way, I would hope, the price of GPT-5.5 falls significantly in a year when GPT-5.8 is out.

Someone else on this post commented:

> For API usage, GPT-5.5 is 2x the price of GPT-5.4, ~4x the price of GPT-5.1, and ~10x the price of Kimi-2.6.

Having used Kimi-2.6, it can go on for hours spewing nonsense. I personally am happy to pay 10x the price of something that doesn't help me, for something else that does, in even half the time.