How is that surprising? We've been taking that into account for any LLM related tooling for over a year now that we either can drop it, or have it designed in a way that we can switch to a selfhosted model when throwing money at hardware would pay for itself quickly.
It's just another instance of cloud dependency, and people should've learned something from that over the last two decades.
Not so much that it was surprising, rather that we looked at a competitor’s site and noticed that a) their prices went way up and b) their branding changed to be heavily AI-first.
So we thought, hmm, “wonder if they are increasing prices to deal with AI costs,” and then projected that into a future where costs go up.
We don’t have this dependence ourselves, so this seems to be a competitive advantage for us on pricing.
It's just another instance of cloud dependency, and people should've learned something from that over the last two decades.