This was the inevitable endpoint of the current AI unit economics. When inference costs are this high and open-source models are compressing SaaS margins to zero, companies can't survive on standard subscription models. They have to subsidize the compute by monetizing the user's context window. The real liability isn't just ads; it's what happens when autonomous agents start making financial decisions influenced by sponsored retrieval data.

Thing is there are OSS models that are near as good. So I don’t see why you’d stay for ad flop when you can just point openrouter one to the left.