Why would I use those models on your cloud instead of using Google's or Anthropic's models? I'm glad there are open models available and that they get better and better, but if I'm paying money to use a cloud API I might as well use the best commercial models, I think they will remain much better than the open alternatives for quite some time.
Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.
Or spend 20 a month for models even a 5090 couldn't run. And not have to spend your own electricity, hardware, maintenance, updates etc.
This is why everyone needs to get every flavour and speedrun building all the tools they need when the infinite money faucets are turned off.
At some point companies will start raising prices or moving towards per-token pricing (Which is sustainable, but expensive).
And with that in mind, i definetly dont use more than a couple of bucks a month in API refils. (not that i really am a power user or anything)
So if you consider the 20 bucks to be balanced between poer and non power users, and with the existing rate limits, its probably not that far off being profitable, at least on the pure inference side.