You are only priced out if you only care for SOTA right now and can't wait for the inevitable cheap model coming in 6 months. DeepSeek, Xiaomi and Moonshot are already really cheap and match frontier performance from 6 months ago.

But they’re artificially cheap. When will they be cheap while the company makes a profit.

They are not artificially cheap, they are still cheap even when hosted by independent inference providers. Are all providers subsidizing their open-weight models?

Nobody's making profits right now, not because they're selling tokens for less than their cost but because they're always investing in the next bigger model.