Have you seen these? While not directly talking about subscriptions vs API pricing, they suggest that overall gross economics look thin to negative which suggests the much (1-2 OoM) cheaper subscriptions are likely loss-making (if heavily used). The OAI article talks specifically about inference costs and argues inference spend alone appears to be greater than the revenues it compares against.
Have you seen these? While not directly talking about subscriptions vs API pricing, they suggest that overall gross economics look thin to negative which suggests the much (1-2 OoM) cheaper subscriptions are likely loss-making (if heavily used). The OAI article talks specifically about inference costs and argues inference spend alone appears to be greater than the revenues it compares against.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/
Perplexity’s (w/ GPT-5.2 Thinking) conclusions about how credible these articles are: