Free Yourself of the Coming Subsidy Apocalypse

Click baity headline? I sure tried. I promise real content, though. Here's the concern - what happens when OpenAI and Anthropic turn off the ridiculous subsidy they currently provide. You pay them $200/mo and you get $8,000 to $14,000 of tokens if you had paid the API price. Truly shocking. And truly wonderful. Or is it? What happens if you build your business on this subscription model and later the rug is pulled out? I know - now it's not so wonderful. And frankly, I've been ignoring this. I still don't think it's a problem for this year or next year. And I'm LOVING the current subsidized plans. So I've put off until tomorrow planning for this. Fortunately, somebody else has taken on the challenge. Jordan Urbs has quit his $200/mo Claude Code subscription and is replacing it with a subscription to Venice, a provider of access to hosted open weights models like Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8. Many more, actually. It's also $200/mo which - at first - made me think "you aren't saving money". No, but these are not heavily subsidized plans. If he can get the work done for that same $200/mo without subsidy, then he's not vulnerable for the COMING DAY OF SUBSIDY APOCALYPSE. Myself, I've been working hard on my own benchmark and model routing. My problem is I CAN'T get all the work done for $200, and I'm looking to sub as much of my work to cheap open weights models as I can - so that - I'm not going to multiple $200/mo subs. I'm actually doing some of what he talks about in the video already. But I don't make videos, so watch his if you are interested. PS: I'm still betting that cost of intelligence, particularly for coding, will keep falling. By the time the subsidies end, they won't be needed. But I'm happy to see peopel pioneer a better exit strategy than "hope". Link to the video in the comments