This is something I keep asking and can’t get a good answer for. You see some of the ads as “your $20 per month gets you $300 in tokens!” But that’s not sustainable unless it’s being subsidized by low use people.

But then for that matter, what does the value of a token mean? Is it the amount of money you would save as compared to having a human work? That doesn’t help the company providing the service.

Or maybe is supposed to cover the price of the compute to execute the query. That would be ideal, but I don’t think that value is correct.

I really think it’s “the first hit is free” approach and soon they’re going to start jacking prices up. I believe all of them are operating as loss leaders, just to try to get market share and even this few initial price increases are showing how much they’re bleeding money.