It was inevitable that the providers would stop giving away free cookies and milkshakes.

I pay Google $5/month for Chat and my wife gets to share that: a fantastic deal. I even get a short weekly (one each) opus and gemini vibe coding sessions with agy.

I pay for inference: I paid $3300 for a Mac mini 64G M5-Pro which runs Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next (3 bit quant) with pi-dev and the results are so very much excellent enough for about 60% of my work and paying Deepseek for deepseek-4.1-flash with Deepseek Harness handles almost everything else.

I worked at Google in 2013 and I mostly like them as a company. I like their approach to AI in general, but I hate the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI and I fear the US taxpayer is going to pick up the tab on this one.