If they can't scale 300 searches for way less than $5 in costs, they are doing something very wrong. Consider that you can get 1M tokens of inference for less.

You can get 1M tokens of inference because it's subsidized by VC money. The whole point of the parent comment is that this is closer to the actual cost to provide a service.

That $5 has to cover organizational costs, not just compute. There's 40+ employees, so salaries alone would be a significant chunk of their entire income if all of the 45k members were on the $5/mo plan.

the $5 is the cheap drugs that your dealer is offering. They hope you'll start popping for the good stuff for $10, which is often less than I pay for a single lunch, and I use it constantly