alt Hacker NewsI think introductory here means more or less permanent but they can't publicly admit there are no takers at a higher price.
Anthropic for instance announced a couple of days ago that they are making Sonnet's 'introductory pricing' permanent https://xcancel.com/claudeai/status/2086891169217122586
When a company gives away service a heavily subsidized service as a promo, the full cost of serving it (compute) can get classified as sales and marketing instead of just cost of revenue, which makes your gross margin look better!