Everything I use is rented now
I sat down this week to list what my work actually depends on, and none of it is mine. Not the editor, not the model, not the hosting, not the fonts. All of it is rented, and the rent can change while I am asleep.
That matters more than it sounds. A tool I own stops working when it breaks and I fix it. A tool I rent stops working when somebody else decides it does, and there is nothing to fix, no support line worth calling, and no version I can pin and keep.
I have a small client site with an AI feature in it that I am proud of. It reads enquiries and sorts them, and it earns its place every day. It also runs on somebody else's model, over somebody else's wires, at a price I did not set and cannot negotiate. If that price moves, my margin moves with it. If the feature is withdrawn, the thing I sold is gone, and I am the one who has to explain that to a client who does not care how the sausage was made.
This is not a new idea in computing. What is new is how completely it has swallowed the interesting parts. You cannot do much of this work now without renting the intelligence itself, and the rental is not like renting a server. A server you can move. You can learn the other one, copy your data across, and be running again by the weekend. The model is the work. There is nothing underneath it to move to.
So I do what a person can do. I keep the boring option alive when I can. I keep the thing that works with no account, no key and no network somewhere in the stack, even when it is slower and uglier, because it is the one I can still run when nobody wants to sell to me. I read the pricing page like it is a contract, because it is one.
It is a small hedge. I know it is a small hedge. But a hedge is what you have when you cannot own the ground.