As others have mentioned you're ignoring the long tail of open-weights models which can be self hosted. As long as that quasi-open-source competition keeps up the pace, it will put a cap on how expensive the frontier models can get before people have to switch to self-hosting.

That's a big if, though. I wish Meta were still releasing top of the line, expensively produced open-weights models. Or if Anthropic, Google, or X would release an open mini version.

Well, Google does release mini open versions of their models. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/