> The flat-rate subscription is really the only thing making it accessible right now.

So this paragraph from the "Welcome To Gas Town" article [0] suggests to me that real, sustained users of a Gas Town instance are paying far, far more than -say- 600USD per month:

  Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.

200 USD per month is something that I -as a working programmer- wouldn't think twice about spending for a fantastically useful tool (even if I had to spend it from my own pocket). If I had to pay 600 USD/month out-of-pocket, it would have me thinking for a bit to see if it was really worth it, but if the company was footing the bill, I'd expense it without a second thought.

Compared to USian programmer pay (especially Yeggie-level pay), 600 USD/month absolutely does not qualify as "a cash guzzler". Hell, that's less than the cost of the sort of health insurance you usually get at nice software companies.

I suppose that there's an alternative interpretation where Yeggie is concerned about the actual cost to the LLM company for the queries that Gas Town makes... but that seems unlikely to me. First, why would he care? Second, why would he say "You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from."? I would give zero shits about where my LLM company's money comes from... that's not my problem.

[0] <https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...>

The age of Pump and Dump software