We are seeing with OpenAI, allegedly through their new pricing scheme, as intelligence and model efficiency increases they offer the same throughput while advertising 1/2 as much usage, letting Astra consume more usage, essentially only being available to those wealthy enough to afford it while still offering essentially unlimited Sol and Luna to their subscription tiers.

Also if you're cache hit rate is high enough a billion tokens tokens from Deepseek 4.1 Flash costs less than $15.

Inference is highly profitable business, even for third parties with much less resources and expertise.