It's not that subsidised, this is just wishful thinking. You can run a local model like Qwen for equivalent prices. You might see it go up to $0.50/hr but you're definitely not going to see it at $22

I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference.

You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.