In 2026 we can all agree that AI and agentic development are certainly exciting topics which many see yielding great productivity gains. But as the investor-subsidized pricing of these services gives way to realistic and profitable business models, where will the real costs land?

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AI tools like Claude, Copilot, and Cursor are currently priced far below their actual compute costs, subsidized by hundreds of billions in investor capital. Anthropic spends roughly $180/month to serve a developer on a $100-200/month plan. OpenAI lost $12 billion in a single quarter. Hyperscalers are committing ~$700B in AI infrastructure capex in 2026 alone. The author argues this pricing is unsustainable and predicts agentic AI subscriptions will increase 10x-100x by end of 2027. Businesses making irreversible decisions—like laying off engineers in favor of AI agents—based on today's artificially low rates face serious risk. The recommended approach is treating AI adoption as a portfolio decision: maintain engineering capability, instrument AI costs now, and avoid over-dependence on any single AI service.

AI Benefits - But at What Cost?

Betting on AI Productivity for Your Company’s Software Development Needs