People can easily self host email, file backup, etc but pay for service anyway

Who pays for email? Who pays subscriptions for file backup? Why would you when you can just use another companies service that is free? Self hosting AI is increasingly viable, but that isn’t even the problem for companies hoping to make billions on it, the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing. Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.

AI will be prohibitively expensive to self host for a very very long time.

It already isn’t, there are tiny models that are practical for some things that will run on basically anything, and there is a lot you can do with a mid to high end graphics card. Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long. But even if AI running on datacenter hardware maintains a big advantage, that’s not enough for these companies to make huge profits selling access.

My wife uses AI to write complex Excel spreadsheet formulas saving hours. She still has to double check them but it saves enormous time. My friend uses it to write proposals. Again it needs to be checked and again it saves hours of time.

AI doesn’t replace people. It provides a productivity boost and it has been doing it for 2 years now.

To me it’s obvious that AI is and will be really useful, but one of the great things about it is that it looks like a lot of that won’t be possible to gatekeep. Which seems like it would also mean that efforts to monetize it will fail.

FreeTube is currently broken, maybe for the same reason OP is having problems, YouTube changed something on their end. Although supposedly the fix is coming through shortly. Shoutouts to the maintainers doing all this work.