45% is brutal if you're building on top of these models as a bootstrapped founder. The unit economics just don't work anymore at that price point for most indie products.

What I've been doing is running a dual-model setup — use the cheaper/faster model for the heavy lifting where quality variance doesn't matter much, and only route to the expensive one when the output is customer-facing and quality is non-negotiable. Cuts costs significantly without the user noticing any difference.

The real risk is that pricing like this pushes smaller builders toward open models or Chinese labs like Qwen, which I suspect isn't what Anthropic wants long term.

That's the risk you take on.

There are 2 things to consider:

    * Time to market.
    * Building a house on someone else's land.

One could reconsider whether building your business on top of a model without owning the core skills to make your product is viable regardless.

A smaller builder might reconsider (re)acquiring relevant skills and applying them. We don't suddenly lose the ability to program (or hire someone to do it) just because an inference provider is available.

> if you're building on top of these models as a bootstrapped founder

This is going to be blunt, but this business model is fundamentally unsustainable and "founders" don't get to complain their prospecting costs went up. These businesses are setting themselves up to get Sherlocked.

The only realistic exit for these kinds of businesses is to score a couple gold nuggets, sell them to the highest bidder, and leave.