When people suggest to use AI for open-source projects, what exactly are they advocating for given that the median open-source project budget is pretty much $0/month? Maybe $1/month if the maintainer likes to have a website for the project.

The $20 / month subscription is less than I pay for electricity already and the local models are also capable enough. A lot of the top open source projects have paid devs working on them already.

Ha, I just shipped an open source library using the Anthropic API. The way I solved the cost concern was by having users bring their own API key. Zero infra cost on my end and they pay for what they use.