It’s the same as the SaaS model. Price keeps going up, and to justify it they keep forcing you to upgrade to new versions with features that nobody asked for.
Every use case of every customer doesn’t need more intelligence. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority will be perfectly fine running on “low intelligence” at a cheap price forever.
I for sure agree that plenty of current use-cases are solvable by non-frontier models.
However, you said “new versions with features that nobody asked for”, and I would prefer that you concede the point before shifting to arguing a new point.
What customers are asking for is smarter models. Because the tasks that only smarter models can solve are higher value, higher margin, than the tasks that non-frontier models can solve.
Citation: have you looked at OAI and Anthropic’s customer growth numbers?