Whilst the conclusion of the article certainly seems plausible, it glosses over the cost calculations and simplifies them too much.

The cost of a subscription is somewhat offset by being guaranteed income regardless of usage, following the financial models of gyms. Whilst api costs represent both the convenience of on-demand pricing and the scale for applications with many users.

Further, the costs of api and subscriptions need to cover the operating costs of the business, the massive SOTA training costs as well as the costs of inference.

The true cost of serving tokens is buried in all of that in these enormous, opaque companies.