I don’t feel like reality is so interesting that CC devs are sitting in a room theorizing how to extract the most profit from their users.
I’m much more inclined to believe they just don’t _care_ about cost, and profit is an ancillary benefit to their functionality above all else.
Just recently they released auto idle-compaction for large sessions about to miss the cache window. If they were so profit driven I can’t imagine they’d have built this to begin with, that’s free tokens from your perspective.