It's important to become early users of everything while AI is heavily subsidized.

Over time, using open source model as well will get more done per dollar of compute and hopefully the gap will remain close.

Question is if OpenAI is actually making money at $200/month.

With o1-preview and $20 subscription my queries typically were answered in 10-20 seconds. I've tried $200 subscription with some queries and got 5-10 minutes answer time. Unless the load is substantially increased and I was just waiting in queue for computing resources, I'd assume that they throw a lot more hardware for o1-pro. So it's entirely possible that $200/month is still at loss.

For funded startups, losing less can be a form of runway and capacity especially at the numbers they are spending.