I don't buy that at all - you should look at what happened in the past, not to what's happening in the present. Over time, prices will go DOWN not up, due to improvements in hardware, engineering and probably smaller, more specialised models. A lot of investment will go into making that happen, like any other automation. If OpenAI did want to try and price gouge, then they'd just make a gap in the market for someone else to fill. Also - just consider how absurdly high SWE salaries are - it would have to get orders of magnitude more expensive than GPT 3.5 (say) for it not to be 'basically free' in comparison.