The next AI price increase may sell me a workstation, not a bigger subscription.

OpenAI now offers Pro 500 at $500/month. Eligible existing Pro 200 subscribers keep their previous included allowance through October 29, 2026, then move to a lower allowance at the same $200 price.

For heavy users, the question is not just the price on the invoice. It is how much real work that invoice pays for.

I already pay for two Pro subscriptions. My usage did not explode while writing theory. It exploded when I moved into custom code. I knew that bringing the design to life would be the hard part.

Not "make me an app."

Make this particular architecture work as intended. Preserve its boundaries. Handle interruption, conflicting state and recovery without quietly changing what the system means.

I see very capable models working hard on these tasks. The difficulty is real.

A drawing is not a sculpture. Turning a design into something that actually works is another kind of creative work, with its own resistance and discipline.

Change recovery logic, and you must examine pending writes, permissions and old data after an interruption. A patch that looks elegant but breaks one of these is not elegant.

This is craft. Sometimes it takes thirty lines. Sometimes it means removing a mechanism that looked clever yesterday.

More code is not the objective. Neither is complexity.

The skill is not merely asking the tool to cut. It is knowing which cut preserves the object you intended to make.

That is why I am looking harder at expanding local compute: DGX Spark-class machines and larger workstations. Not trophies. Equipment for a workshop with actual work waiting.

I expect some work to become slower and require more iteration. I would still use frontier cloud models where their extra capability justifies the cost. More retries are not a guarantee of correctness.

Local is not free: hardware, electricity, depreciation, maintenance and my own time all belong in the calculation.

But buying useful compute gives me a different cost structure. I want the option to keep working without every difficult iteration becoming another credit-purchase decision.

My measure is cost per accepted, verified change. Not tokens per second or subscription prestige.

And $500 a month is $6,000 a year. Being a professional does not make that money imaginary. Independent development can slow down simply because the tools consume too much of its budget.

Cloud AI remains valuable. But making it more expensive for people who actually build may strengthen the case for owning more of the workshop.

I am not trying to generate more code.

I am trying to finish what I actually set out to build.