Remember when Uber rides were cheap? VC subsidized your rides for a decade. Taxis died! The plan was never to stay cheap.
Published Aug 3, 2026
Author Steve Berry
Remember when Uber rides were cheap?
VC subsidized your rides for a decade. Taxis died! The plan was never to stay cheap. The plan was to make you dependent.
Once you've offloaded your writing, code, strategy, memory, thinking, workflows…They can raise the price. What are you going to do, learn to think again?
The one thing keeping the market honest is, of all things, China. Alibaba ships Qwen for free. It runs on my Mac Studio. Every time Anthropic raises a price, an open model lands. The communists (China’s communist, right? I have no idea anymore) are the antitrust now.
So here's the move: assume the cheap part ends. Keep one foot on something you can run yourself.