I'm honestly 100% okay with it as long as it's reasonable and not confusing to customers. (Not saying Apple isn't somewhat; I mean, buying a non-Pro iPhone 15 and not being able to view WebM files feels literally fucking insane, and that's apparently how that works, but that's a rant for a different thread.) In cases like this, presumably the idea isn't actually feature-gating, it's scaling up. AI inference costs compute time, and although I have no idea if the inference occurs on special hardware or not, if it does, I can only presume that scaling up the special hardware to meet demand is challenging and very much not like scaling up e.g. a typical web service.

IMO, Tiers can be useful when they make sense and aren't just for artificial market segmentation.