But Kimi (at least say) will release their weights. So surely, if their prices are too high, somebody else will host it cheaper?

a) Why and b) With what compute?

"Why" as in, why take lower margins when Moonshot currently can't service all the demand for the model anyways. Based on past models no one is going to massively undercut Moonshot: few have the chops to serve it as efficiently as Moonshot and of those few, most of them don't go for being the cheapest, they go for being fast + reliable (think Together, Fireworks).

You get what you pay for applies very much with how many axes there are to serving these increasingly large models.

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And for "with what compute": as the value of a token goes up, what people are willing to pay for compute is going up.

Every once in a while I'll see a story about falling rental rates, but with even slightly more established clouds I've been seeing availability get worse and worse over time.

I'm pretty sure the only reason the highly informal indexes don't reflect this is because every neocloud trying to cash in on an NVIDIA Inception discount kicks off by selling unrealistically cheap compute for a bit.