That might be true of the raw, unknowable "true" value of the thing, but that's not the same as what people are willing to pay for a thing.

When one evaluates a purchase, implicit in that evaluation is the option to do the work one's self. If the price you are offering a thing is more than the cost of doing it myself, then I will not buy from you.

LLM coding proponents keep saying that it reduces the cost of development to near-zero. We keep hearing about all the "things we wouldn't have done before because it was just too expensive to get people to do it."

If this is true, any day now, the customers and clients and consumers are going to catch wise and start doing it for themselves. I mean, it's been almost a year since LLMs supposedly "10x'd" everyone's productivity. I'm still waiting to see where all this singularity is, so I doubt it actually is true. But it doesn't mean you're going to achieve ungodly margins on your software sales, especially when we're talking about open source software. Value absolutely does have a component that is the cost of the inputs.