Looking at the pricing of 1-2T models like Kimi or DeepSeek on the open market, I'm tempted to assume that inference costs are closer to subscription pricing than to API pricing.

Especially considering that subscriptions a) distribute load over time via rate limits, and b) will include a lot of users who get only a fraction of the possible value, whether they are on a personal account where they are on the rate limit on the weekend but barely use it during the week, or are corporate users who were issued an account they rarely use. Subscription prices are usually measured on the average case, not the most extreme value a power user can get out of it