Exactly. There is no shortage of providers hosting open source models with per-token pricing, with a variety of speeds and context sizes at different price points. Competition is strong and barriers of entry low, ensuring that margins stay low and prices fair.

If you want complete control over your data and don't trust anyone's assurances that they keep it private (and why should you) then you have to self-host. But if all you care about is a good price then the free market already provides that for open models