There’s a specific moment when you realise you’re not a customer.

You’re a product being milked.

It happened this Wednesday.

I’m mid-flow. Building. Transferring notes. Refining the voice of UNSENT. The machine is humming.

Then – ping.

“You’ve used your credits. Upgrade to continue.”

I was shocked. Not because I didn’t expect it, but because I didn’t expect it today.

So I click through. Check the pricing plan.

A few months ago? Simple. One plan. £200 a month. Take it or leave it.

Now? They’ve scrambled the deck.

£80 for 5x capacity. £200 for 20x.

They’re trying to catch the stragglers, lure the budget-conscious, and bleed the power-users – all at once.

That’s not a pricing strategy.

That’s a sign of desperation.

Then – insult to injury – I open Claude.

The other big player.

Offline. Server error. The mighty model had fallen over.

Two of the most hyped AI models in the world – one begging for money, one crashing out.

You have to ask yourself: how long until the whole house of cards comes down?

We’ve seen this before.

Dot-com. Crypto. Every hype cycle starts with infinite money and ends with a graveyard of companies that forgot to build something sustainable.

This feels no different.

And then there’s DeepSeek.

You’ve probably heard of it. Chinese model.

Free.

Not “free trial.” Not “freemium.” Just… free.

Doesn’t want my credit card. Doesn’t have a tiered system to trap me.

Look – I’m not a China shill. I have no idea what their long game is. Maybe it’s data, maybe it’s dominance, maybe it’s a very expensive loss-leader to blow up the market.

But right now? In this moment?

It’s doing what the incumbents can’t: delivering value without the panic.

It probably won’t last. Nothing this big stays free forever.

But for now? It works.

And that’s more than I can say for the guys begging me for £200 a month while their servers choke.

The worst part? I’ve got to wait till Saturday to use my usual setup again.

Three days of limbo. Three days of rethinking everything.

The bubble hasn’t burst, but I saw the cracks this week.

And I wasn’t surprised.

Because the bubble always had a price tag. We just pretended we weren’t on it.