It's a trade-off. Every hyperscaler is buying and building compute capacity as fast as they can dodge red tape. There is limited compute capacity, and scarcity is a real thing.

As a consumer I can choose to buy subscriptions to a range of things, including $5 droplets or VMs on a broad range of cloud hosting providers. I can even buy cheap bare metal at a bunch of providers at an affordable retail rate.

I can also buy "unlimited" AI packages that will be optimized to fit the cost model from a variety of services, with different impacts, such as rolling outages when I consume a daily or hourly allotment.

Right now VC and the investor class are subsidizing the rapid evolution of the services and availability, but that VC is running out. In more traditional economies, AI would have developed and rolled out more slowly, and through metered subscriptions, with the eventual rolling out of "unlimited" packages like telephone, internet, or cell services once the market became commoditized.

We have seen a big inversion of that with the race to "win" AI marketshare. Now the true cost is being exposed, and the most competitive and capable models are hideously expensive to operate, so it makes sense that we are moving to metered billing for a utility service. If you want gas, you can buy regular or premium. If you have a premium car you definitely want the premium, but for most people regular is good.

Give it a couple of years, and the survivors will settle around fairly industry standard models of consumer grade services, pro-sumer accounts, and business/enterprise models.

Things are still shaking out, but I get the sadness. Luckily I work at a big tech company who is banging the drum on doing experimentation so I use my prosumer claude pro and other accounts at home for hobby stuff, and save my heavy lifting and potentially experimentation for work :P