I currently pay for Max 20x and the demand at work is so high that I can only get everything I need done because I have access to Claude. However, $200 is equivalent to 70% of the monthly minimum wage in my country, so I don't know anyone else who has Max 20x besides me. The ones I know who pay for Claude reach a maximum of the $20 Pro plan, but what they need to do is much simpler than what I do.
And, well, I know that this phase of "low prices" for subscriptions is temporary, maybe in less than a year we will see an increase in monthly prices, or such drastic reductions that it becomes impossible to pay for AIs in underdeveloped countries. I remember that when Claude started with the $20 plans I was able to do all the necessary work with it back then, and today I pay 10x more to do the same work I did a year and a half ago.
If Anthropic creates a $500 Max 100x plan, for example, I know it would still be affordable for some programmers around the world, but something completely out of the question for programmers in other poorer countries, like mine.
Given this, I tested some cheaper or even free and local AI models, but the cheapest ones don't deliver what they promise and the local ones require a lot of RAM. I did the math and to run the best deepseek model (for what I need) I would have to buy hardware parts equivalent to 80 monthly minimum wages in my country. It is genuinely impossible for us.
Therefore, I imagine that what might prevent things like this from happening is people not paying for the most expensive plans, but at the same time I can't say how "expensive" Claude actually is from the perspective of an American, for example. For me, using Claude via API is total madness, I used it once and in a single message I lost the equivalent of 6 hours of work.
So, what do you think will happen? Will programming AIs become tools reserved exclusively for developed countries?
Claude gave me a lot of freedom, I created projects that I would never be able to accomplish in such a short time. I gained a lot of financial freedom due to these projects, however, I find myself spending more and more and being able to use less. What will probably happen?
tl;dr: access to AIs is becoming increasingly unequal. Will this get worse or not?
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