I agree with you, but also the APIs are proper expensive to be fair.

What people probably get messed up on as being the loss leader is likely generous usage limits on flat rate subscriptions.

For example GitHub Copilot Pro+ comes with 1500 premium requests a month. That's quite a lot and it's only $39.00. (Requests ~ Prompts).

For some time they were offering Opus 4.6 Fast at 9x billing (now raised to 30x).

That was upto 167 requests of around ~128k context for just $39. That ridiculous model costs $30/$150 Mtok so you can easily imagine the economics on this.