> I'm tempted to assume that inference costs are closer to subscription pricing than to API pricing

So just going on vibes?

While some people don't like his content, Ed Zitron shows a lot of evidence for your assumption being very wrong.

These companies are bleeding cash at ungodly rates. It's likely their API pricing is still subsidized if you look at their overall financial picture.

Related, there's a good reason those API prices keep going up a lot every new version and it's not just because the models are better.

Selling inference for more than inference costs is not incompatible with bleeding cash at ungodly rates. They do in fact pay ungodly amounts of cash for other things, like training, marketing, etc. Heck, you can bleed cash while being profitable (in the accounting sense)

Also, API prices going up a lot every new version is more an OpenAI thing, and even there it's a recent trend: GPT 5.0 was a big price drop compared to 4.1, and 4.1 was cheaper than 4o, which itself got a price cut at some point and is cheaper than 4. Meanwhile Anthropic's API pricing stayed stable for many versions, then got slashed to a third with the 4.2 release and have stayed at that level since.