It costs hundreds a month for the customer, but way more for the companies. Try claude code, it's pay as you go, and it's like .5$ to 1$ per task, and it doesn't even complete it well, so if you make it work 24/7, I'm pretty sure it's gonna swallow your money for a result weaker than with a regular engineer. Moreover, you need someone to check what the AI is doing AND you need to prompt it properly (unless the CEO is willing to do that himself)

So right now, I have a really hard time seeing LLMs as a well-spent money if they were bought at their real cost

OpenAI lost $5 Billion in 2024. They have talked about their programming agent running $20k/month. There will be a price point where AI coding assistant makes zero sense for many companies.

Sure, what I was going for was more in the sense that they'll likely increase in consumer price in the future. It will still possibly worth it, just an important thing to consider.