Kris Brandow
Works on Go tooling and hosts Fallthrough, a podcast for Go developers that picked up after Go Time ended.
“If Anthropic or OpenAI tried to get rid of their plans, they would completely undercut themselves as a business… Google has a money machine. Facebook has a money machine. SpaceX has a money machine… If everybody is using Gemini in their personal life and then they come to work and say, hey, can we just use Gemini? We're already in Google Cloud. Just hit this switch. It's the same reason Azure is the number two cloud, even though arguably Google Cloud should be: it was just another line item on the same Microsoft contract.”
Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Nick had argued that moving to API-only pricing would make people bounce. Kris extends the point: the consumer subscription is the funnel that makes engineers want ChatGPT or Claude at work, and dropping it would hand the market to the labs that sit inside big incumbents.
Transcript
…like little bits of research that I think Luna would be great at. So I think there is a world where more people consume less usage by using those sorts of models and then where you can actually go and reasonably use API billing as an individual and not have to pay like a tremendous amount of money.
…the price of local compute hardware. We might see a bit of like a bear market for local LLM for a bit in 2027 after kind of a renaissance from 24 through 26. But yeah, it's, I don't know. To me, AI API pricing would make more people bounce. And there's no reason to do that at this point in time.
…from Google. Like Gemini is not so much worse. Like if the option is like, I have to do API pricing, which is just not tenable for most individuals, or I got to go use Gemini. People are going to use Gemini or they're going to use Grok or they're going to use or they're going to use Muse, right? They're going to use one of these companies that is not going to have this problem, right? Because Google has a money machine. Facebook has a money machine. SpaceX has a money machine. Right. So if Anthropic or OpenAI tried to get rid of their plans, they would, I think, just completely undercut themselves as a business. Because also, especially, it would be such a boon for Google because if everybody is using Gemini in their personal and then they come to work and they're like, hey, can we just use Gemini? And it's like, oh, we're already in Google Cloud. Can you just plug…
you can also gate products and betas and previews around subscriptions too. Like there's like, it's a little bit more of like an interesting product suite play as well from my perspective. Again, outside looking in.
And like the lay person is not going to is not going to use API pricing. Right. They're, they're just absolutely, they're going to use like the lower ones. And I think I saw something. I don't know if it was a random tweet where someone was like, most of the subscription revenue comes from the plus…
And to your point about using Luna, I've actually been thinking about using Sonnet for more programming tasks. I mean, the speed and the usage may not be like, is there even a need for a fable model anymore if you're doing research? Was that like the end of fable size models for programming? And I…
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