That chart is comparing the cost of buying tokens, not the cost of generating your own. The system I specced out can generate 5.2M tokens per day.

That's $104/day of opus 5.5 tokens, or $265/day of fable 5.1 tokens.

If you were able to saturate usage of this system, you could pay it off in 3 days of fable time or 6 days of opus 5.5.

But ok those are more intelligent. Let's go with something that scores similar - sonnet 4.6. 5.2M tokens is $78/day and the system is paid off in 8 days.

imho those prices are artificially deflated to serve as a loss leader. Either subscription cost goes up or some other model such as advertising fills the gap.

I don't really understand the argument being made here. The best models are better, but they're not that much better. If I'm paying only 20% as much for 20% less performance, I can make up the 20% and have abundant cash or compute left over to spare.

The other thing that matters to me is the tooling. I could use Deepseek Harness with Claude but I'd rather support the same people that brought me DSH.

This makes no sense. DS4.1 flash is the cheapest model basically everywhere

From those retailers with billions of debt?

Seems more like a final fight against open weight models than a sustainable business model.

Cool story bro