This is exactly it. Selling the output of a LLM is going to an incredibly cut-throat and low-margin business.

The more interesting, novel, and useful work you wrap the LLM in the more defensible your pricing will be.

That said I think this can describe a lot of agentic code tools - the entire point is that you're not just talking to the raw LLM itself, you're being intermediated by a bunch of useful things that are non-trivial.

I see this with Anthropic most - they seem to have multiple arms in multiple lines of business that go up the abstraction ladder - Claude Code is just one of them. They seem to also be in the customer service automation business as well.

[edit] I think a general trend we're going to see is that "pure" LLM providers are going to try to go up the abstraction ladder as just generating tokens proves unprofitable, colliding immediately with their own customers. There's going to be a LOT of Sherlocking, and the LLM providers are going to have a home field advantage (paying less for inference, existing capability to fine-tune and retrain, and looooooots of VC funding).