> At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab

The real price for tokens at a specific level of intelligence is dropping rapidly. Between models improving and new hardware getting faster, I think prices will be going down, not up.

> Better to get a handle on it now.

I experiment with a lot of providers and models. I strongly disagree that anyone needs to start migrating now in preparation for prices maybe going up in the future.

It doesn’t make sense. Deal with a price increase when it happens, if it does.

Switching models and providers isn’t some huge lift. I can jump to a new model or even hardness and get a feel for it in a day or two. It’s not some huge undertaking that requires preparation and planning.

If prices go up, try something at that point in time. Don’t worry about it until then.

When Claude Code subscriptions really started to catch on, there was a popular idea on HN that Anthropic's end game was that basically every dev adjacent role would need to pay for a $200/mo coding plan.

Then, both Anthropic and OpenAI in lockstep developed a enterprise pricing structure that openly coerced large businesses to pay API prices where it was feasible to spend $200/day rather than the comparatively cheap $200/mo.

Even if token pricing relative to intelligence does trend down over time, that doesn't mean the pricing structure will actually translate to lower costs, particularly in the cash cow B2B market.