I think sometimes about this, does it really make sense? Financially I mean. The is just my impressions and I'm glad to be corrected if someone has hard numbers and some experience going this route:

At the moment LLMs vendors are in market grab mode and take a loss on big subscription users, they are starting to try to move to profit but they must move carefully to not let a competitor steal their users so we will still have "cheap" tokens for a while.

Even if prices go up by a bit, they have the scale in their favor to optimize costs.

If commercial model providers go into "not competitive" territory with their prices compared to open models, wouldn't it always be cheaper to use an open models inference provider? They can take advantage of scale as well, and with no model moat, competition should keep prices honest.

And last ressort, renting GPU time in the cloud seem like a safer bet than buying a GPU to me?