Nah, that's why you cannot not afford the subscriptions these days. Whatever your needs, ever since Claude Code became a thing, subscription costs come out massively cheaper than pay-as-you-go per-token API pricing. Also SOTA models are so much better than anything else, that using older or open models will just cost you more in tokens/electricity than going for SOTA subscription.
Subscriptions are definitely middle-class targeted. $20/month is not much for the value provided, at least not in the western world.
But if by "rich" you just mean "westerners", then in this sense, the same is and has always been true for computing in general.
The subscriptions are purposely sold for less than cost. The subsidy will end some day.
We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Especially in context of discussing living at different economic strata, customers are neither expected nor supposed to voluntarily overpay out of a belief this will make an industry not try to rugpull everyone at some point.