> any company sitting this out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at a later date.
Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and Gemini can basically do all you need for free.
Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and Gemini can basically do all you need for free.