There's also an alternative which is that token prices are already high, downtimes do exist (semi frequent on Claude) or are managed by serving degraded version

There's also an alternative which is that token prices are already high, downtimes do exist (semi frequent on Claude) or are managed by serving degraded versions/quants (speculation that has never really be proven afaik) or reducing thinking time ("juice" values from open AI), and that free tiers are not used much at all or are a loss leader.