The even bigger hurdle is selling token based pricing to normal (non-dev) users.

"You pay an indeterminant amount of money to ask a question and you might not even get the response you want without spending even more money" doesn't appeal to most people who aren't gamblers and explaining how "thank you" at the end of a long exchange can be expensive due to context is an even harder thing for an average person to swallow.

Token cost going up/down like a yo-yo also doesn't help. Normal users NEED fixed costs and don't want to expend energy constantly keeping up with the AI meta. "My subscription lasted much longer last month" isn't a winning problem either.

I think Apple is correct that Local LLM for most things is the future.

Ugh. It really is. I have allihat.com which is the only safari extension (i think still) that talks to claude. And it's well sought for. But you as a user have to enter a friggin claude api key. :( And I still don't grok their TOS around this. Like you can still type: ```setup-token Set up a long-lived authentication token (requires Claude subscription)``` but this seems like a trap? :) Whose using this? Doesn't this like insta break their TOS if you use that anywhere?

Right now for allihat.com I just let people use the Apple model locally if you don't feel like using the claude key. And my conversions to paying user shot up like 3x! But it really isn't a replacement obviously to claude. I was hoping Apple would make proxying to Claude some kind of thing they do for me so I also don't have to proxy to my own server just to try and manage API to Claude usage.

> For production, route requests through your own back end with .proxied

Apple is offering developers with less than 2 million downloads free AI models via their servers https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...

The same way you did it before — by proxying the requests to your backend.

Users don’t give a API key. The docs show how to set up your backend proxy.