The profit comes from the enterprise customers who have to pay for usage at API rates. Not the subsidized subscriptions, which both OpenAI have designed to be unavailable for large enterprises by withholding IAM and auditing features they need except on the usage based entperise plans.

As an individual I'm still paying for a ChatGPT Plus plan since $20/mo gives me a lot of value and I use many multiples of $20 at API rates per month. But in terms of capabilities, I am entirely satisfied when using my Opencode Go plan with open models like Deepseek Flash/Pro, Kimi and MiMo.

At this point keeping my ChatGPT subscription isn't because of a significant capability gap compared to open models. It's 90% about the value of the subscription priced well below API rates (10% the fun of trying latest models).

If OpenAI/Anthropic dropped their cheap subscriptions or drastically undermined the value proposition I'd be happy using open models exclusively and currently barely notice a difference switching back and forth for the vast majority of tasks.

I'm expecting the subs to increasingly provide less value as the US labs IPO and follow the SV pattern of moving from marketshare capture mode to profit extraction mode. Thankfully I'm already comfortable using OpenCode with open models and avoid lock-in to any specific harness so would be a very soft landing.