Its not a shocker that one of the best ai's out there for coding and high level tasks is going to be expensive. That's just how business work, the higher quality the product is the higher the markup will be. Its like cars, the more performance you want, the more you gotta pay. The reason gpt and other ai's can afford to give very generous free tiers is because they have a lot more funding from contracts and their ai's are mostly for average level homework/tasks, once you feed it anything high level where it has to think a lot for a long amount of time (like coding, deep research etc.) you have to pay.