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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

The entire market is subsided more than it is competitive. The market wouldn’t exist the same as it does today if it weren’t being propped up. Thats the point.

I remember the days when I had a $2000+ credit balance on Uber because I mastered their referral program. “Free” uber blacks for 2 years!

When you’re using free shit that you should probably be paying more for, it’s good to not fool yourself.

In the Uber example, the fact that Lyft also existed at the time didn’t matter to me as someone happily riding around the city in Uber Black for $0. Unfortunately Lyft’s referral program wasn’t so lucrative so I couldn’t switch…

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How does this work with inference providers behind OpenRouter? Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?

> Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?

Are you saying these companies are operating on anything resembling a sustainable business model?

I think not!

If OpenAI needs to impose 5 hour limits during a time where they are aggressively trying to grow market share, what do you think they (or whatever the winning provider is) will do in 5 years once they IPO and need to boost margins?

They won’t be as friendly with usage caps as they’re being now.

`needs to impose 5 hour limits ` I'm no OpenAI defender but that's like saying Apple is going bankrupt because they charge for their products. Why wouldn't they do everything they can to turn $20 users into $200 users?

Exactly. It is common knowledge that all the AI companies have terrible margins. IMO tokens are the cheapest they'll ever be as these companies compete for users.

To the extent that the 3rd party inference resellers are a viable market because of Chinese/certain US AI labs (current) willingness to absorb substantial compute/R&D/data harvesting costs while releasing weights on permissive licensing terms for free, then yes, current pricing is distorted.

Where can I sign up for a monthly subscription on OpenRouter instead of paying the real API price?

Openrouter is not so open as well, right? They take the middle man cut by enforcing their own limit restrictions and 429s on top of the model provided limit restrictions and what not.

Now why would I pay a middle man anything if I can get the same hosted model without their own whimsical service limits?

Uber isn't a good comparison. LLMs are a national or global market, not a local one. Also: already driverless.

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