I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go / per API call / search pricing model... to something that if I use it just once, I pay full price for a month. Same rationale for AI in my IDE, I'm waiting for the pricing models to change
The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.
But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.
Plugins will never match the possibilities of a deep integration. Those who build or fork VS code want the monthly fee because they make way more per customer
