Thanks so much for being bold enough to be fairly open about the costs, how you arrange billing and the advantages that's given you.
I've been fooling around with DeepSeek 4 agentically. It's probably not as good as Anthropic offerings, but even those seem to be roiled in politics and strife and DeepSeek 4 is very good IMHO. I'll later try out GLM.
I'm in Australia. The government has set up a "return and earn" scheme to keep aluminium cans, plastic bottles and paper drink cartons out of the waste stream. A laudable project. The money you make from return drink containers is pretty low, $AU 0.1 per container. I've participated to get the rubbish out of natural water streams and to make a nano amount of money on the side.
When I looked at the costs of an app I was getting DeepSeek to help me with, I realised that the several hours I'd spent learning and building had cost something like 8 recycled containers. In my head after doing some DeepSeek stuff, I calculate a "cans per app" metric for myself for fun. I may even setup a simple graph to view my costs that way.
I kind of hope the Anthropics of the world get enough price competition from sources like DeepSeek and GLM to drop their prices significantly. Time will tell.
I'm using the Chinese DeepSeek provider, so everything done there could potentially be taken and used by the CCP... But this is hobbyist learning.
There is probably a market for Deepseek/GLM served from non CCP available servers. I might even look into how hard that would be to setup here.
I also hope that inference focused hardware will come to the fore, reducing energy use and cost. Realistically this will take time though, on the order of years.
Here in Oz, we have community batteries that community members can charge and later draw from. Their electricity prices are competitive. I wonder if someone could setup something like a community battery to run data centres... That way reasonable environmental consideration could be given to inference power generation... This might not work in a market like the US or Europe, but small market size might be an advantage... Who knows.