By the time the dust settles I wouldn't be surprised if personal interactive usage couldn't even be had for under $200. I can't fit my modelling of the serving costs of these things to any public reporting, even the more bearish examples

Not a lot of people have this budget, and I'm not sure how many people with that type of cash are also interested in paying it for AI.

Of course, this is fine for people in the bay area earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But then your client base becomes so reduced its hard to justify the valuation these companies have.

These AI companies are not hyped so much because they will offer a luxury product, they're valued because they're supposed to "change the world" which luxury does not do.

We pay per token in our company. It is not hard to spend $100 for one morning coding session. So thousands per month per programmer. The company finds it valuable enough to pay for, but if I ever paid these from my own pocket I'd look into DeepSeek et.al.

Comes down to what you mean by interactive usage. Most of chat & say openclaw usage is already within self-host range so no need to spend 200 a month on that.

High end SOTA coding is harder, but even there I suspect a mix of usage based strong models and selfhost small is viable if necessary.