The current AI pricing was always going to go away

# Summary The era of cheap, subsidized AI pricing is ending because the economic model never made sense: while inference costs per token decreased, user behavior shifted to make more complex queries and API calls, ultimately increasing total spending (Jevons paradox). Simultaneously, the supply side economics worsened dramatically—memory costs quadrupled and GPU prices doubled in 18 months due to TSMC bottlenecks and shortage of high-bandwidth memory—forcing AI labs to raise prices to stay profitable, leaving companies with flat-rate AI products facing severe margin problems. Builders must now focus on AI use cases that can justify their actual inference costs rather than betting on indefinite price declines.