How are plungers comparable to LLMs?
You can't only look at how much "value" the buyer gets from the product. That's the mistake made by the original comment.
You might ask "why don't all of the LLM providers just raise their prices?". That's called price fixing or collusion, and is generally illegal.
And I'm sorry to you and the parent poster for being needlessly snarky, I wasn't in a great mood when I wrote my original comment. I'll avoid bothered-posting in the future ;).
"A.I." == "Artificially Inexpensive"
Go to OpenRouter and look at all of the unsubsidized providers.
Is this range just Silicon Valley or what is this? Even including just Europe, you're looking at a lower bracket of 10k. If you expand to the rest of the world... Or do you think rich cities in the USA, where developers make 100k+ per year, can alone sustain this industry?
€57-114k p.a. is well within the order of magnitude of yearly gross developer salaries in Western Europe (e.g. Germany).