I think subscriptions are not going to last for serious users. Great to use them while we can, but AI does not fit the “power user subsidizes free/cheap users” model, nor the “support tens of thousands of customers from a small number of cheap servers” model. Everyone is a power user, and everything is computationally expensive.

I think the trick is to limit programmatic usage as Anthropic did. This way, power users' usage is uneven, allowing the model you describe.