It sure feels like the obvious target for increasing revenue is to charge the software engineers more. Most other users that I see are either using the tech as a novelty, which will wear out really quick once the thumb screws come out, or users who cannot explain to me to save their life what the ROI is beyond "disruption".

The software engineers are also the most likely to pivot to local inference. I know several engineers playing around with local as a hobby. After the first bill comes in that means nobody gets the Christmas bonus this year, they'll resolve the issue and start figuring out how to adapt their workflow.

And somehow I doubt that they'll need frontier for the majority of customers who just need crud and libraries hooked up. Yeah it won't be as easy as with frontier but it just means the party is over and it's time to get back to work.

So ... Maybe security audits need frontier ... And they can pass the price increase onto their customers, I presume, easily enough.

I'm not convinced thats sufficient to pay off the bill that it took to get frontier in the first place.

[And so far, I haven't met a single software engineering customer, although surely they have to exist somewhere, who was actually comfortable vibe coding their crown jewels or even anything vaguely auxiliary. Please engineer ask the magic box to generate code for us. I think they'll be just as happy checking a box they says 'save money by using agentic development' if they box is hooked up to some future price gouging frontier or hypothetically cheaper local setup]