Their business model with the pro plan is to sell a dollar for 80 cents for a while to gain market share. Once they have spent the money allocated to this plan and bring it to a close, don’t expect them to resume it in response to righteous indignation: the money will be gone. See also Uber, MoviePass etc
Inference costs have been in freefall since ChatGPT[1], so this is different than Uber/MoviePass. The primary cost is a technology which is getting cheaper as more investment is put into algorithm + hardware R&D.
future hardware costs do not erase losses on existing capex expenditures, if they bought an (overpriced) nvidia GPU and then it turns out local LLMs or a Chinese competitor can do it for much cheaper investors effectively notice the mortgage is underwater. Tech getting cheaper is only handy if your company (e.g. ChatGPT) didn't already make a big gamble they can't sell off (for fear of hurting the cost of the asset they're trying to sell) see also coin "reserves".
