By: Thomas Stahura
My AWS bill last week was $257. I have yet to be charged by Amazon.
In fact, I have never been charged for any of my token consumption. Thanks to hackathons and their generous sponsors, I’ve managed to accumulate a bunch of credits. Granted they expire in 2026. I’ll probably run out sooner rather than later.
With the rise of open source, closed-source incumbents have been branding their model as “premium” and priced them accordingly. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is around $6 per million tokens, o1 is around $26 per million tokens, and gpt-4.5 is $93 per million tokens (averaging input and output token pricing).
I'm no startup — simply an AI enthusiast and tinkerer — but all these new premium AI models have me wondering: how can startups afford their AI consumption?
Take Cursor, the AI IDE pioneer. It charges $20 per month for 500 premium model requests. That sounds reasonable until you realize that coding with AI is very context heavy. Every request is jam packed with multiple scripts, folders, and logs, easily filling Claude’s 200k context window. A single long (20 request) conversation with Claude 3.7 in Cline will cost me $20, let alone the additional 480 requests.
To break even, by my calculations, Cursor would have to charge at least 15 to 20 times more per month. I highly doubt it will do that anytime soon.
The AI industry continues to be in its subsidized growth phase. Claude 3.7 is free on Github Copilot. Other AI IDEs like Windsurf and Pear AI are $15 per month. The name of the game is growth at any cost. Like Uber and Airbnb during the sharing economy or Facebook and Snapchat during Web 2.0, the AI era is no different.
Or is it?
It all comes down to who is subsidizing and how that subsidy is being accounted for.
During previous eras, VCs were the main culprits, funding companies that spent millions acquiring customers through artificially low prices. Much of that applies today; Anysphere (which develops Cursor) raised at least $165 million. Besides salaries, it could be theorized most of that money is going to the cloud due to AI’s unique computational demands. Big Tech has much more power this time around and are funding these startups and labs through billions of cloud credits.
OpenAI sold 49% of its shares to Microsoft in exchange for cloud credits. Credits that OpenAI ultimately spent on Azure. Anthropic and Amazon have a similar story; however, Amazon invested $8 billion in Anthropic instead of giving credits. But, as a condition of the deal, Anthropic agreed to use AWS as its primary cloud provider so that money is destined to return to Amazon eventually.
Take my $257 AWS bill from last week — technically, I haven't been charged because I'm using credits. However, this allows Amazon, Microsoft, and other cloud providers to forecast stronger future cloud revenue numbers to shareholders, in part on the bet of continued growth by AI startups. (Credits given to startups expire so its use ‘em or lose ‘em before they inevitably convert to paid usage.)
Since 2022, the top three cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google, have grown their cloud revenue by 20%, 31%, and 33% each year, respectively. That rapid growth needs to continue to justify their share prices — and it’s no secret they are using AI to sustain that momentum.
The real question is when will it end? The global demand for compute is set to skyrocket, so perhaps never. Or maybe distilling large closed-sourced models into smaller, local models will pull people from the cloud. Or Jevons Paradox reigns true and even more demand is unlocked.
Only time will tell. Stay tuned!
P.S. If you have any questions or just want to talk about AI, email me! thomas@ascend.vc