Hacker News front pageJun 23, 2026, 23:11 UTC+8

AI's Affordability Crisis

David Rosenthal breaks down the subsidy math behind AI platforms. SemiAnalysis found a $200/month subscription can burn $14,000 in OpenAI tokens or $8,000 in Anthropic tokens—a 40–70x subsidy. Ed Zitron obtained OpenAI's 2025 financials: $13.07B revenue against $34B in costs, a $38.5B net loss, with sales and marketing alone eating 44% of revenue. The post argues the 'first one's free' drug-dealer model is hitting a wall as business adoption fails to keep pace with the cash burn.

Why it matters: David Rosenthal lays out a clear cost analysis using SemiAnalysis test data and Ed Zitron's leaked OpenAI financials: users pay $200/month while platforms subsidize 40-70x the actual cost. Not a new argument (Sequoia's Cahn raised it in 2023), but the data is updated and the c...

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The numbers here are wild. SemiAnalysis ran long-horizon coding tasks until they hit subscription caps and found a $200/month plan burns $14,000 in OpenAI tokens or $8,000 in Anthropic tokens—a 40–70x subsidy. Ed Zitron got hold of OpenAI's 2025 financials: $13.07B revenue, $34B in costs, a $38.5B net loss, and sales and marketing alone ate 44% of revenue. Rosenthal frames it bluntly as the drug-dealer model—subsidize demand now, hope businesses get addicted and pay up later. But Glean's enterprise adoption chart shows OpenAI's business growth has flattened while Anthropic's is climbing, despite OpenAI's subsidy being 75% larger. I'd flag one assumption: SemiAnalysis based the 40–70x multiple on tokens being priced at 4x cost. If that markup isn't real, the subsidy multiplier shifts. The $38.5B loss and 44% marketing spend, though, are hard numbers—this isn't a hole you climb out of by raising subscription prices.

Source: Hacker News front page · blog.dshr.org
Published: Jun 23, 2026, 23:11 UTC+8 · Jun 23, 2026