I am really afraid of this as well. When using one of the plugins for vscode, I would easily use a few million tokens a day. Thus with Claude Code I assume it isn't much different under the hood. The prices on openrouter are roughly $5/M for the better models. Therefore paying $20/month can't be sustainable.

Once enough developers are addicted to AI assisted coding the VCs will inevitably pull the rug.

I wonder if Alibaba will put out a 100B A10B coder model which could probably run for $0.5/M while giving decent output. That would be easily affordable for most developers/companies.