Grab gpt-oss-120b, run it continuously and see how far 20 dollars worth of that gets you. People definitely use much more than that in a month, not just power users but regular ones, and they're using models that are more expensive to run (plus the "cloud" markup).
heres some napkin math
gpt oss 120b is in/out price at 0.039/ 0.18 per million on open router. heres some assumptions.
1. the ratio of input/ouput is about 25/1. (coding is mostly grep and fairly low outpu)
2. you are getting 75% prompt cache reads
Case B: 50% Prompt Caching Discount (Standard Provider Rate)At 75% Prompt Caching:Total Tokens Obtained: 658,749,010 (approx. 659 Million tokens)
Input: ~633mil
~475 mil cached at 50% input pricing = ~$9.25
~158 mil uncached = ~$6.15
tokensOutput: 25mil tokens ($4.5)
This doesnt even account for profit margins on inference providers, or the fact that openAI probably has a much more efficient inference stack.
its really hard to know what these companies are actually paying, but from everything im hearing, people are reporting API inference pricing is 50% margin.