Is this a reverse psychology trick to convince people to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions?
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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If you have it through work you know what to do
Welp, just got fired for sending 18000 prompts to ChatGPT today.
I salute your sacrifice.
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Totally not a bubble, honest guv!
If you've got a toy project that you want "AI" to give you a hand with, do it now.
Pretty soon all these companies are going to have to pay for all that investment in compute resources they've been busily soaking up over the last few years, and then they're going to have to pay back their investors, and then they're going to have to try and make a profit
This is the golden time for cheap commercial AI. Already the noose is starting to tighten, and it will never again be as cheap as it is now.
Sounds like it'll never be worth it.
In five years once this RAM nonsense is over you'll be able to run a comparatively high quality local LLM for very little money. I can't see how these companies will ever make their money back.
If manufacturers are willing to sell components to us in five years that is.
Of course if the colllapse happens before then the story might be different…
I’m slightly optimistic that manufacturers will return to the retail market eventually. Every AI company is racing to hyperscale right now but there will be a point where the infrastructure is built and at that point the growth will slow down quite a bit. In that scenario there will be ongoing demand for components to be replaced as they become obsolete but I can’t imagine the demand will be the same level it is right now as everyone rushes to build.
That’s assuming this all works the way they want it to. If the economics aren’t viable and the bubble bursts…
Their Datacenter buildout doesn't work they want to. Most projects are very much delayed, and those that even started getting built are over budget. OpenAI and Anthropic will collapse in the next years, and this is coming from someone who absolutely sees the good things about the technology itself.
OpenAI and Anthropic will collapse in the next years
Stop, I can only handle so much good news!
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This is the golden time for cheap commercial AI.
I suppose, but small open weight models with more advanced coding frameworks optimized for them are catching up fast and you can do it privately at home on a mostly affordable consumer graphics card.
If you have solar it's basically free, minus the graphics card CapEx you may want for gaming anyway, as well as some setup time and a bit of patience.
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Nice try, OpenAI sales reps.
How much of our water, electricity, tax breaks, and public land does it use?
Yes!
Please do.
Use it all.
Bankrupt these shit companies and help burst the bubble
This is their strategy, they want people to use it, get hooked, replace parts of their day-to-day life with it, make it to difficult to "just go back", then hit them with the actual bill.
They won't go bankrupt unless their backers walk, and their backers are still quite confident in this strategy.... because it's working.
But no one is going to be able to afford a $14,000 subscription for slop.
No, but if you get that number in everyones heads, there is much less resistance to, say a 100 EUR a month increase.
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Sounds like a trap. Big cruises are said to have buffets, but yet, they’re still floating.
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But how much is the data you’re giving them worth? The other option is don’t give them your money or your data. The Qwen 3.6 MoE model with OpenCode is running pretty well on my RTX 4060 gaming laptop. According the Codacus YouTube channel, it even runs decently in as little as 6GB of VRAM.
Edit:
Fixed typo.
TBH local models aren't as good as cloud. Even with 16GB VRAM you aren't getting anywhere close to >100GB cloud LLM
No, it’s not quite as strong, and especially the initial prefill can take a bit. I also sometimes run into infinite thinking loops where I have to stop it and re-run my last prompt.
It’s surprising how close Qwen 3.6 gets on the benchmarks to Claude models, though. Especially when running locally with 200k context, I’ve found it’s good enough to be a daily driver. Despite the faults, it’s better than paying Anthropic $200 a month so they can rate limit me and collect my data.
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Nice try, I still ain't gonna pay. OpenAI can go bankrupt without burning my money
This is just Gym Economics though, right? They work on the assumption that only a small number of their member will actually use the service heavily, but the overwhelming majority will turn up to use the treadmill a few times then never visit again.
Ok but it would take 70 users paying $200 to cover the cost of $14,000. So if one person maxes out their usage, there needs to be 69 users who do not use their account at all but are still paying. And that’s just the break even point, still no profit for the AI company.
I’m struggling to believe that many people would pay that much and then underuse the subscription. It seems far more likely to me that this pricing model isn’t sustainable.
Even worse, that calculation is based on that their API pricing is currently providing a positive margin. From what I have seen and heard at this point, API pricing is at best breaking even.
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DEFINITELY NOT A BUBBLE EVERYBODY NOTHING TO SEE HERE
All the investors know it's a massive money sink right now. The goal isn't for "everyone" to get to use AI.
It's to get so many people used to using AI that businesses like law offices and hospitals and other corporations so ingrained and built around having AI, while leaving so many graduating college students useless without AI, that businesses will be reliant upon it, no matter what costs of it they will have to absorb.
In five years there won't be a $200 plan. There will be a $15,000 plan per person and businesses will pay it because they won't be able to do well without it.
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The total I spent on AI is $0. How much AI can I get for that?
If you keep opening a new private tab and starting new conversations with chatgpt, your usage including uploads is free!
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I wonder what companies that have integrated AI into all their workflows and processes are planning to do when the times comes to pay real price for the tokens.
spoiler
Nothing. They aren't thinking ahead.
That’s the next CEOs problem to solve while the current one is enjoying his golden parachute and sailing around the world. Right now, number is going up!
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The actual cost to OpenAI is likely much less. The number in the article is calculating the API cost that a fully maxed out subscription would incur theoretically. The API token cost, however, is far above the actual computational cost.
I disagree - the analysis takes as a basis a very, very generous margin of 75% on API prices. There is no way they have that much of a margin, this is wishful thinking.
And every single user who maxes out their 200$-subscription burns more cash than they take in from 70 subscriptions that lie dormant.
I was talking to one of our cloud architects at work yesterday. They did a test and just ran in "asdf" to a chat prompt, and were able to trace the costs. It was 12 cents.
I could totally see AI costs getting out of control very quickly. Doing something like a Copilot formula in an Excel spreadsheet is easily going to run up hundreds of dollars of costs eventually.
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Here is the second part of the table btw, with an illusory 75% margin on API pricing:
This will never be profitable if not specialized into very specific areas with very large payoffs. Even coding isn't paying off enough.
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