Oh don't worry, you get to keep your higher usage allowance for one month. hahahaha

I'll be the first to bemoan these companies but there are many, many locations where even with today's higher prices and level of service they come out way cheaper and way more reliable than incumbents.

It's getting shitty, I agree, but still feels like a net improvement to where we were over a decade ago.

I was happy to take VC money to uber to parts of town I wouldn't have otherwise for that period of time. Only my local bar lost out on selling me like maybe 20 drinks over the year or so.

When I first learned about Uber ~14 years ago they were offering free rides in my city.

Yeah, with Opus 5.5, my impression is that the OpenAI $200 plan was already worse than the Anthropic $200 plan. Sol 6.1 might have tilted the balance in OpenAI's favor again, but these changes more than negate that.

I'll cancel my OpenAI plan after this billing cycle. Let's see how this plays out.

Tired of their investors saying that

Related:

Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889306

Yeah no. $200 was the top for me. Which doesn't super matter to me, I pretty much only use luna. I can't tell the difference between luna vs sol/astra other than those larger models do more ambitious things that I don't ask for.

Yea, the $500 package is likely a rebranded $200 from a few months ago. Keep in mind all providers have been cutting token allowances for their subs for a few months now

Price escalation and reduction in features just leaves a horrible taste in my mouth as a consumer, and moreso, a human.

I want them to succeed as a business so I can use their products, but trust does erode over time. I wish they would realize this and value their customer more.

On what tokens? The ones of today's model, or tomorrow's?

The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.

Move fast and bill things

or they could simply remove the annoying guardrails

First, I wouldn't put it past OpenAI to charge even if your prompt triggered the guardrails, transferring responsibility is their style.

Second, how does vague billing prevent someone from mapping the "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" style of responses to map the guardrails?

Yeah it's wild that they don't outright state the specific usage limits.

Just trust me bro accounting.

Remember when people talked abouthow these models are similar to gambling. Well, might be preetty much loot box logix crossed with DLC

Fuck, that's smart. Thank you for the idea.

Yes, you are. All of this was obvious from the start. The prices will go up way more soon (tm)

[delayed]

I'd rather use the fancy models while absurd valuations are subsidising them and then pick up a couple grand worth of their old hardware in a few years when they're eol.

  Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
  Jerry:        How is it a write-off?
  Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
  Jerry:        Write it off what?
  Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
  Jerry:        You don't even know what a write-off is. 
  Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
  Jerry:        No, I don't.
  Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

I've talked to VP at my company and we both agreed $1000 for the time saved, is still 'worth it'.

Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.

I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.

As a consumer paying $20 now to chatGPT where i hit those gauntlet usage messages then using Muse a lot and not receiving any such messages. Im questioning my $20 a month GPT subscription and my $5 a month Gemini (Google has enough money as Meta to make it free) subscription.

Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!

Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.

Maybe they're trying to milk as much as they can before open-weight models cause the prices to come crashing down?

Given that I burn through 2 x $200 subscriptions, I really hope Sol 6.1 is indeed as good as Astra (￣ー￣；

Decent(-ish), but doesn't provide good value for the money, sadly. They still refuse to tell you exactly how much usage you're paying for. My original suggestion a few months ago was to provide a $500/$1000 tier but make it _unlimited_, which this doesn't appear to be.

Lowering usage limits, increasing price.

This is just the beginning. Migrate to open models ASAP.

For a second I was worried I somehow missed 490 versions.

On the plus side, it'll be easier to compare these new plans than what we have with all the models.

It looks like they have literally chosen the most straightforward sounding plan names they could think of.

The pricing is on the linked page but does not appear to be selectable in ChatGPT UI yet.

Thanks...

It's strange if that ends up to be this way. It's hard to see why would anybody subscribe to the $200 - or even the $500 for the sole benefit of using ultrafast (depleted probably within hours).

I checked it's actually awful lol

Yes they used to show an estimate of how many messages you can send in each tier and for each model.

But past few weeks, I don’t think it was accurate since my usage was going down faster. They nerfed the usage and now aren’t even giving estimates.

I’ll be doing the same as you 10/26 when our grandfather limits end, in addition to downgrading my Anthropic sub. I guess I’m shopping for hardware and open weight AIs now.

What? So I have 2 200$ openai plans this is saying the 500$ is almost equivalent to a SINGLE 200$ plan?

Or it's saying it's always on fast mode therefore it's like running a 20x on fast all the time?

Super confused.

500$ is a old 200$ plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast?

What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.

Found a whale: "It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem" https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-math-problem-solved-t...

Interesting thing is that I would have expected Anthropic to do the price hike on the basis that their models are so much better right now. But it's more likely that OAI will have to backtrack regardless of what ANT does. Interesting times ahead.

If ANT does the price hike, OAI will be forced to backtrack because they're just not equal, OAI is behind. ANT would still be a much better value overall, and people will remember that it was OAI that made their ANT subscription more expensive. So the hiatus will happen. There's a lot of users that have $200 plans on both ANT and OAI. $500 leaves the slot for just 1 sub for them.

But I think the price hike is not going to happen. $500 is much, much harder to justify than $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.

Been doing it slowly for months week over week allowances have been getting cut by 5-10% consistently

No actual mention of the actual 'cutoff date' anywhere to be seen. Was it today? Yesterday? 6 months ago?

You can't, Pro is only available with monthly payment.

you can pretty much run frontier-level models locally now with GLM 5.3 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next so this pricing feels very geared towards squeezing people who are still dependent on cloud subscription models only and don't know how to divert grunt work to cheaper models automatically with the 'smarter' frontier models acting as orchestrators and refinement

https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/chinese-flash-models-a...

Great naming scheme that doesn’t even survive exchange rates, or future price changes.

Me too, I'd say we are about two weeks away

Very cool how I'm supposed to feel good about paying $200/mo (a VERY expensive subscription!) for months, just to be told that in the near (but not immediate) future this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value I used to get.

Fuck that shit!

Way easier to do with Anthropic plans, but I guess subsidized AI is over? Didn’t think it was happening this soon.

Yeah sorry I misunderstood you. And yeah I bet that it is the cerebras collaboration although they didn't explicitly say this, maybe their own chip is fast enough for this inference speed? But I could only take a guess if its this or that

Yes that's their new ultrafast tier which is only available on this plan

Almost certainly yes. The value prop here is the 8x speed. This is incredibly valuable to many many builders.

dangit, I've been loving the subsidies.

Yep. It's hitting limits because models have effectively reached the logical endpoint of how "precise" their outputs can become. In order to overcome this they need to either a) get excellent at outputting and working with massive codebases (10+ million loc) since a singificant % of systems simply cannot be done in less than that (the language itself isn't expressive enough) or b) reach the next stage of intelligence where the models are somehow able to output sequences that can solve vast complex problems with a very narrow output. Option b isn't really possible (various statistical/computational fundamental limitations forbid it) and option A is _insanely_ expensive. Which is why all of the demos the frontier labs have been pushing out are either really impressive one shot demos where the model is able to take a concise input and produce something great on its own, or very long running internal sessions where they claim to do something vast with minimal oversight (NavierStokes, C compiler, Bun rewrite).

It’s about time for some laws against unpredictable pricing like that.

Pure scam pricing.

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is good enough for me thanks.

It's a bit more complicated than that though. Dollars per token is not the right metric to track.

My favorite comparison was that we're basically buying a GTX 1070 Ti every month, except instead of a GPU we get some extra productivity.

Hmm, a super-programmer familiar with almost every framework in existence that can ship entire new apps in a day and collaborate with you realtime, or paying to train someone in a different time zone for some likely subpar work?

But they're slower and don't work in my timezone. The value to something like this isn't the ability to do work, but the ability to quickly iterate.

Could you hire hundreds of them over long running tasks for that fixed price to work every day and night for a month?

I would rather use a skilled dev + AI. As dev I am more likely to learn from AI, as it is better at explaining concepts than devs fresh out of school.

To those balking at the price: this is just the beginning.

Subscription pricing will eventually compete with labor costs

I had the 200 USD subscription for a bit, with the change to it I'm downgrading to 100 USD and might move back to Anthropic in entirety since they fixed the Opus 5 slop writing issue with Opus 5.5 (though their 200 USD plan is also a lie with bad marketing, around 1.7x weekly tokens). Or maybe just keep two 100 USD subscriptions and see how they compare.

It's crazy that people will have to pay 500 USD for only slightly more (and faster) usage of basically what I already enjoyed for the past few weeks. And even I got close to hitting weekly limits doing regular development across a bunch of codebases (admittedly it was on Astra High).

I feel like even the 500 USD subscriptions are not "get out of my face with those limits for all single developer use cases" (not even that many overnight tasks, I might have run a few here and there, and not even full 8 hours of work a day), but soon you'll have people needing multiple of those 500 USD subscriptions, unless they pull off crazy token efficiency gains for how the models work.

Guess the economics are catching up to AI companies, sucks that I don't have a bunch of money to burn every month.