I'm paying $20 for Codex and $90 for the Claude Max plan. They are a "pry from my cold dead fingers" product for me.
IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
Would you still pay if prices were to increase,say $1500-2000 monthly?
The CPU speed race might be the most apt comparison I've yet heard.
From the 80486 to AMD Athlon64 X2 and much of that progress was enabled by better EDA being run on the more powerful CPUs being made with each improvement.
Now, we have better models helping to create even better models.