Pricing is dropping quick. Inference is so cheap, I think they are losing a lot less money selling subscriptions than you think. It might even be more expensive managing the load, than actually selling the tokens at subscription prices.

We are seeing with OpenAI, allegedly through their new pricing scheme, as intelligence and model efficiency increases they offer the same throughput while advertising 1/2 as much usage, letting Astra consume more usage, essentially only being available to those wealthy enough to afford it while still offering essentially unlimited Sol and Luna to their subscription tiers.

Also if you're cache hit rate is high enough a billion tokens tokens from Deepseek 4.1 Flash costs less than $15.