For me it was pretty clear from the start that costs will have to increase. It is the classical drug dealer model: first you hook them with cheap supply, maybe

For me it was pretty clear from the start that costs will have to increase. It is the classical drug dealer model: first you hook them with cheap supply, maybe even free, then you slowly jack the prize up to a level that can (just) be sustained. Then you decrease the quality of the product by diluting it so you get more bucks for each gram you bought. You could also call it enshittification if you like. The goal of every company that needs to make ever more money for investors is to earn more money while spending less. There are many ways of doing this without reducing the quality of the product, e.g. using less staff to do more, getting more compute out of same the energy, using cheaper or free energy, optimizing algorithms in ways that do not degrade quality or you grow because you gain more customers and break into new markets etc. And once you made all these optimizations and the market is saturated, then the only optimizations left are the ones where the quality goes down or the risk is increased. Quality in that sense, is what you can get away with without customers jumping ship. So you will also work on locking customers in and make jumping ship look very hard and complicated.