That's totally fair, I should be more conscious about different positions (and not get stuck in "as someone with a stable income..." thinking) and you're right these things can build. Curie as a model should cost 1/10th of Davinci - also the recent models are all better I think so if you've not tried them since the GPT-3.5 release it might be worth trying the smaller ones again. If you could get that to $2/semester it's a lot more palatable, as long as the quality isn't too bad. Maybe there's a flow where you can identify low performing cards/subsets so you can do 90% in Curie and 10% in Davinci.

I think my expectation of this kind of service (on demand huge network) is fixed monthly fees, call us for pricing, etc. It's cool that it's approachable as a student. It'll be very interesting as costs for these things drop and/or performance improves at the same price points.