I mean this at large, but I just can't get over this "sell me a product" mentality.
You already don't need to pay; all of this is happening publication to implementation, open and local. Hop on Discord and ask a friendly neon-haired teen to set up TorToiSe or xTTS with cloning for you.
Software developers and startups didn't create AGI, a whole lot of scientists did. A majority of the services you're seeing are just repackaging and serving foundational work using tools already available to everyone.
I agree, buy playing devil's advocate, it's true that people without the time and expertise to setup their own install can find this packaging valuable enough to pay for it.
It would be better for all if, in Open Source fashion, this software had a FLOSS easy-to-install packaging that provided for basic use cases, and developers made money by adapting it to more specific use cases and toolchains.
(This one is not FLOSS in the classic sense, of course. The above would be valid for MIT-licensed or GPL models).
The answer is convenience. Why use dropbox when you can run Nextcloud? You can say the same thing about large companies. Why does Apple use Slack (or whatever they use) when they could build their own? Why doesn't Stripe build their own data centers?
If I had a need for an AI voice for a project I would pay the $9 a month, use it, and be done. I might have the skills to set this up on my machine but it would take me hours to get up to speed and get it going. It just wouldn't be worth it.
You already don't need to pay; all of this is happening publication to implementation, open and local. Hop on Discord and ask a friendly neon-haired teen to set up TorToiSe or xTTS with cloning for you.
Software developers and startups didn't create AGI, a whole lot of scientists did. A majority of the services you're seeing are just repackaging and serving foundational work using tools already available to everyone.