In this solo commentary, Adam Sand explains that the era of "subsidized AI"—low‑cost subscription plans like Claude Max ($200/month) or ChatGPT Pro that deliver far more value than their price— is ending. He argues that venture‑backed providers used cheap plans to attract users, but as AI models become more powerful and costly, pricing will rise dramatically (potentially to $2,000, $20,000, or $200,000 per month). Sand highlights Anthropic’s decision to pull the plug on Claude Mythos, citing discovered 6‑ to 9‑year‑old software vulnerabilities that make the model too dangerous for public release, signaling a shift away from democratized access toward an AI hegemony that could create a permanent underclass. He uses a gym‑membership analogy to illustrate the transition from flat‑rate subscriptions to token‑based API billing, noting that many users lack the skills to manage context, prompts, and token consumption efficiently. Sand stresses the urgent need for users and businesses to learn prompt engineering, context management, and ROI calculation now, before higher‑priced models become the norm, and describes the recent server overload caused by a sudden shift to API‑key usage.
Chapters
So when you buy a Claude Max plan for $200 a month, the reality is that that Claude Max plan or ChatGPT's Pro account or GPT's Ultra account, if you actually look at what they give you, it's about $2,000 minimum worth of value. They've called it subsidized AI. And what do I mean by subsidized? So businesses want users. So venture capitalists say, here's $1 billion, give everybody $2,000 worth of AI, but charge them $200 to get them hooked and get them platform absorbed, get them absorbed into your platform and get 'em hooked so they're on the thing. Well, that is coming to an end. The concept of subsidized AI is coming to an end. So if you've been paying attention to me on social media, I've been saying for years now, when they first came out with the $200 plan is when I first made this video. I said, if you don't buy the $200 a month plan and figure out how it can get you a return on investment so that that $200 makes you $2,000, if you don't figure that out now, eventually there's going to be a $2,000 a month plan. And then a $20,000 a month plan, and there'll be a $200,000 a month AI model that you just, if you don't figure out how to get an ROI from AI now, eventually this subsidized AI thing is gonna stop. So Claude was the first to pull the plug. They also dropped Claude Mythos. Claude Mythos or Mythos, I don't know how they say it, but that is the first AI that they've ever released where you don't get access to it. The only thing that I'm fortunate with is with this AI project that I'm a board member in, we have a direct connection to Amazon that will allow us to be the beneficiary of it, but we still don't get to use it yet. We're just going to have like kind of be the beneficiary of it, but it is so good that nobody's getting access to it because the byproduct of how good it is allowed it to find 6-year-old 9-year-old, 15-year-old security vulnerabilities in software. So basically what Anthropic said was, this is so good that if we put it out there for anybody to use with a Claude Max plan, one random person could use it to exploit all of these billion-dollar companies because they literally showed in their documentation, here's a 9-year-old software vulnerability that we found in Adobe. Here's a 6-year-old software vulnerability we found in Microsoft. It's so good at cyberattacks that they couldn't give it to the public. That could be a smokescreen for just the end of the democratization of AI, where literally it's the haves and the have-nots, and this is the start of the AI hegemony that creates the permanent underclass. That's the big fear. But in the middle of that, okay, you have API tokens. All Claude did— the bet that they made when they did subsidized AI was it's like a gym membership. You give everybody access to the gym for $40 a month. What do we know? Most the people Get a gym membership, come for 2 weeks, keep paying for 18 months. So you can give $3 million worth of equipment, give access to that for $50 a month. And you know that you're going to get 3,000 members paying $150,000 a month. You're going to churn 20% a month or whatever, but you're also going to sign up a bunch more. So then you can subsidize people's access to the gym equipment because not everybody is going to come in every day and use the gym. Well, all of a sudden it was like everybody using the gym all day, every day. Like people weren't coming to the gym once a day, they were coming to the gym 5 times a day and it was every member of the gym. So that was the end of subsidized gym memberships. They said, look, if you want to use things like OpenClaw, which chew through tokens and there's this many of you using it, well then you have to use the API key and actually pay the token cost, which a lot of people are pissed about because they don't know how to properly manage context. So you want AI to learn something. There's a PDF like a Scribe and you say, hey, Scribe, you go through and you do an SOP and then you download it as a PDF and then you give it to OpenClaw or Claude or whatever. Be like, this is my SOP, do this. Well, 50,000 tokens it's gonna burn through to learn that PDF. And then anytime you want to access that PDF again, it's gonna have to respend that 50,000 tokens. You could literally go 2 more buttons down in Scribe. Download it as Markdown and it'll use 500 tokens. Literally 1/100th of the cost, 1% of the token usage. So there's a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing that are suddenly like, this is too expensive to run. And that's why I said you have to learn how to get a return on investment from AI at $200 a month so that when the $2,000 a month model comes out, you know how to use it. Now, this process of switching has been disruptive. For the entire AI community, even for Claude, because then everybody switched to the API key overnight basically, and then blew up the servers. And it's kind of like everybody came to the gym on January 1st and all the equipment was busy. And then now this week everybody's getting the bill and they're going, oh, I don't know anything about how to use AI. I need to learn how to properly manage context sessions and prompt engineering and context engineering and orchestration layers and, you know, how to actually structure memory and Giving constraints and just don't feel like, hey, make me money, don't make mistakes. You know, all these stupid generic prompts that don't work. That is what's coming is that your use of AI has been subsidized for the last 3 years. That is going away.
