> New subscriptions that aren’t eligible for grandfathering include a lower usage allowance than previously offered with Pro 200 to reflect our increasingly efficient models.
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.
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.
I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.
What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…
For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, etc. + Costco, Chase Travel, etc. Codex plus browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions if you try to use the ChatGPT Pro web UI. Had it queue CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week of labor. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
For flights, SerpApi (for Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I combine with a MILP library that I give various travel constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.
If it’s small percentage then you could spend just that few dollars in API costs or lower subscription and the rest is profit. So you're not saving anything, just reclassifying that opportunity cost to feel better about your subscription’s value. I know it's pedantic but it's useful to be aware of opportunity cost trying to trick us.
Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.
I try to do the same thing, but I just don't see these very large savings. I can't even really justify the $200 or $100 tier off of it. I usually can match it immediately or beat it with just some brief Googling. I simply don't think the price arbitrage just really exists in any reliable way, month to month. Its more of a bonus if it happens to work out.
My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings:
- Two one-way flights
- New OLED 55"- 65" TV
- Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs
- Expensive, specialized medical device
- Variety of car parts
I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.
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.
I mean, it's a good deal for the boss, but I also wouldn't want to waste two years of my life doing something I could do in a couple months or weeks, would you? That's not a good use of my life, regardless of whether someone's willing to pay me.
My take - the $500/month is likely similar to the $200/month plan (albeit with Astra Ultrafast that consumes tokens ultrafast).
Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:
Maybe me: “you’re charging $500/month for what was $200/month earlier”
Maybe OAI: “no we’re not!! You get *more* tokens than the older $200/month plan and did you hear, you get Astra Ultrafast access!”
Maybe me: “oh really? How many more tokens??”
Maybe OAI: “I’m sorry we can no longer share that information, it’s confidential. National security and all…”
More than an hour after I wrote this, OAI sent an email sounding eerily close to my approximation:
- $500 plan comes with not 20x,
but 25x allowance!
- also Astro Ultraspeed
- $200 pulled down to 10x quota
Things I hadn’t anticipated:
- one time ~62,000 credit
top-up ($2,500 API call
value)
- 5 hour quota limits removed
The removal of 5 hourly quotas can negate some reduction in token allowance. Especially relevant for those of us working in 2-3 day bursts (such as weekends). Because these folks weren’t using their full weekly quota before, they already had a decent buffer.
Maybe OAI thinks people are creating new unnecessary work to use their allowance completely. Well they aren’t entirely wrong. But the experimentation has been useful in letting us discover new use-cases, and to develop and flex our agentic muscles.
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.
If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. It's like gmail is free, but Google is harvesting all of my data to sell me ads. Meta is doing the same with Muse.
You can use open weights models right now and ignore all this fuss. And by the time open weights models are objectively and subjectively on par with what Fable/Astra are today, the frontier labs will probably offer something newer, more capable and more expensive. The models OpenAI and Anthropic roll out clearly aren’t for people on a strict budget.
Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?
Yeah, I mean currently a lot of people still prefer using 5.6 Sol over Astra for implementation tasks. If 6.1 hasn't fixed output alignment (vs task completion) this is a huge price increase for those wanting to keep using 5.6 Sol...
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.
Agree but if you don't want to then be at the mercy of the cloud providers when everyone is rushing for the exits, you need to start thinking about securing hardware now.
Seriously, even the "Learn more about limits" link just takes you to the posted page where it literally says nothing about limits or usage. Not even x20 or x10 or whatever, just zero information on what "more usage" actually means. I don't understand why they can't provide how much token usage you get.
Afaik the usage quota nerf to $200 Pro is true. Twitter is all over them right now. (Also you haven't been able to buy the $200 Pro plan for the last two weeks or so)
Literally just downgraded to the $20 a month one, as they're not grandfathering in the old plans. I don't think this is going to work the way they thought.
I can't believe I am defending these people and am not arguing this is the case, but a change in the multiplier isn't necessarily a downgrade if the value of X has increased. Yes, relative to Pro the new tier isn't as valuable, but it could still be more valuable relative to the old tier for the same price.
I'm saying we don't know what x is for Pro usage. If Pro's newX is 3 times oldX, new10x > old20x.
That aside, all of the ambiguity around usage is killing their credibility (among other things). Usage limits feel like they swing wildly day to day and week to week, and it's hard to trust any of the other claims they make when that's the case.
This day may go down in history as one of the worst in OpenAI's history. It's so bad it's funny.
OpenAI announced they built clones of apps that already exist, codex for normal people, and 2.5x price increase for the product that is already getting decimated by competition.
What is happening at OpenAI?
I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.
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 $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.
Yeah I think you're right I have around 500$ a mo budget for AI.
Had both a anthropic and openai then switched to 2 openai for astra. They want to capture the straddlers between both.
But this is a horrible decision. They could have eased customers into this instead of massive change. The are literally more than doubling the cost for no value add.
A smart company would have done this when they released astra or only allowed astra on 500$ plan. Or made it more sutble. I would likely have ate a 20% increase but this is over double.
It's not clear that they are hiking the price on Pro 200. Cache reads are down 75% from GPT 5.6 to GPT 6.1. So it looks like they are slashing the margin on their API and reducing the gap between subscription and API. 2x off API in exchange for committed spend is still a good deal for lots of people.
> If your Pro 200 subscription was active at the eligibility cutoff or during the seven days before it, you’re eligible to keep your previous included usage allowance through Oct 29, 2026 while you have an active Pro 200 subscription.
> After that date, your subscription will move to the lower included usage allowance. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
Imagine buying this shit for a year, upfront, and then having to deal with this. Nice.
I wonder how this will go with the new releases like MiMo-v2.6-Pro or future GLM, DeepSeek, and Kimi releases around the corner. Once planned with Fable or Astra, the build process isn't much different with the open weight models from my usage.
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 models and/or don't know to divert grunt work to cheaper models automatically
The idea is you'll always be paying that price, they'll just shrinkflate what you get and not tell you by how much. This has already been happening, now they're being a little more explicit about it.
At this rate I expect end-to-end work getting done, no babysitting whatsoever. The agents should literally be calling me and talking about their problem if something needs my input.
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.
The performance changes between models are almost static. Recently, GPT has shifted almost entirely toward token efficiency.
Astra is good at making 3D assets, but realistically its coding was not as good as GPT 5.6 Sol.
Have we reached a point where getting better at one thing means starting to get worse at another?
This announcement is the worst one yet.
Nerfing existing usage
A more expensive top-tier plan
Showing off how slow Dots is right in the demo video
And GPT Space—are they telling us to use it instead of Notion or what...
Overall, throughout the entire announcement, everything OpenAI wants me to look forward to just leaves me, as a developer, disappointed.
I ended up going with a Synthetic subscription (they host some open-weight models including K3 and GLM 5.3). They're the only subscription that I found that's simultaneously cheaper than token rates, and is extremely transparent about usage and pricing.
I tried searching for "Synthetic AI Subscription" and "Synthetic Data" is such a massive keyword in AI pre-training circles it's impossible to find the company.
How does that make economical sense from the side of synthetic though? (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I usually am)
If they're simultaneously cheaper than token rates but couldn't they have sold these tokens in the first place on a platform like openrouter?
And the platforms that are hosting these tokens on openrouter aren't really earning any money at all in the first place as that itself is a race to bottom (and its more so just neutral, neither positive nor loss or barely profitable) so unless synthetic is actively making loss, and if that's the case, then it might not be sustainable, I don't quite understand the economics behind it.
Is the economics behind this the fact that since its a single subscription instead of token based pricing. Some people might use less tokens than what their subscription costs and so it offsets/subsidizes the other set of people who need more tokens.
But then, this means that as you had suggested in the first place, it would be a good deal for the people who want more tokens, so they would flock even more to the platform and it should eventually balance out unless external money is being burnt as I had said earlier.
I am genuinely interested in how they make this work so I would love if someone can shine some more light to it as I would like to read more about its economics that makes it work, thanks in advance! :-D
It appears, from the outside, to be a collection of small optimizations:
- The way they pace and limit usage seems to echo some strategies I've seen to reduce the impact of burst usage
- They cut down the maximum context length of most models
- They claim to have some custom sauce that improves how they handle API requests and reduces error rates
- Their explanations appear focused around optimizing concurrency in the same way that the 'flex' mode of some APIs does, though I've not seen specific docs of them claiming that this is part of how they save on costs
There may be more that I haven't seen or noticed. I don't work for or with them.
It took me a while to figure this out too and only did in the last couple days: a 10x, 20x, or 25x plan is the cost of your monthly sub times that multiplier in terms of API costs.
So a 20x plan, that was formerly $200, would have been $4000 in API credits. Which sounds like a lot but the API is absolutely horrendously expensive - like you'll burn through $100 in 45 minutes of 5.6 Sol on High reasoning. I know this because I did this once.
They still used multipliers in the email. The relevant passage was:
Starting October 30, 2026, your included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex will decrease from 20 times to 10 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance. Your GPT-6 Pro limit in Chat will decrease from 200 to 100 messages per week. Your price remains unchanged and you’ll keep your current limits through October 29, 2026.
And:
For those who want even more usage and speed, the new Pro 500 tier offers our highest usage allowance, with 25 times the usage of Plus. It also includes access to Ultrafast, with up to 8 times faster token generation.
226 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] threadactual lol
Enjoy the Lyft v Uber era while it lasts!
Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889306
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.
Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math
Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?
Or does it just refuse to try?
I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day.
How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?
My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings: - Two one-way flights - New OLED 55"- 65" TV - Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs - Expensive, specialized medical device - Variety of car parts
I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.
That would limit the $500 plan to smaller businesses.
Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.
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.
Gets to put you under pressure to deliver more while paying you less. A few months you say, why not weeks? I'm sure the latest model can do it.
Also, forget about those "easy" ideas, if you are not on the verge of burnout every day you might as well not be working.
Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:
Maybe OAI thinks people are creating new unnecessary work to use their allowance completely. Well they aren’t entirely wrong. But the experimentation has been useful in letting us discover new use-cases, and to develop and flex our agentic muscles.
Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!
Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.
Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?
I think this is the first instance where it means you are actually paying 500$
This is just the beginning. Migrate to open models ASAP.
Apparently they don't want to compete now that they're doubling the costs.
It looks like they have literally chosen the most straightforward plan names they could think of.
So expect further downgrades in the plan features for the same price.
100 = € 103,-
200 = € 229,-
500 = € 509.99,-
Besides the naming being insane, the pricing strategy for each seems to have been made by a different team.
Previous $200 tier: 20x pro value
New $200 tier: 10x
New $500 tier: 25x, plus ultrafast mode but it drains 6x the cost (!!)
The $200 cut to 10x was announced only formally on Twitter
However none of their product pages mention concrete #s, so I guess value will only degrade more over time.
Or it's saying it's always on fast mode therefore it's like running a 20x on fast all the time?
Super confused.
500$ 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.
Yes.
> What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.
If you have unlimited money, it lets you give it to OpenAI to get faster results, presumably because you don't have unlimited time.
That aside, all of the ambiguity around usage is killing their credibility (among other things). Usage limits feel like they swing wildly day to day and week to week, and it's hard to trust any of the other claims they make when that's the case.
"Yesterday you gave me 10 Frooby Bucks and charged 2 Frooby Bucks per banana. Now you gave me 5 Frooby Bucks and charge me 1 per banana!"
Half usage for the same price.
This is the same nonsense Anthropic got burned for. I think I'm gonna bite the bullet and find a GLM or Kimi provider already.
OpenAI announced they built clones of apps that already exist, codex for normal people, and 2.5x price increase for the product that is already getting decimated by competition.
What is happening at OpenAI?
I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.
Same here, but I’m worried it’s the latter. We’ll probably see an Anthropic price hike in a couple of weeks.
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 $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.
Had both a anthropic and openai then switched to 2 openai for astra. They want to capture the straddlers between both.
But this is a horrible decision. They could have eased customers into this instead of massive change. The are literally more than doubling the cost for no value add.
A smart company would have done this when they released astra or only allowed astra on 500$ plan. Or made it more sutble. I would likely have ate a 20% increase but this is over double.
> After that date, your subscription will move to the lower included usage allowance. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
Imagine buying this shit for a year, upfront, and then having to deal with this. Nice.
https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/chinese-flash-models-a...
Makes perfect sense.
(If you're an idiot)
Fuck that shit!
The performance changes between models are almost static. Recently, GPT has shifted almost entirely toward token efficiency.
Astra is good at making 3D assets, but realistically its coding was not as good as GPT 5.6 Sol.
Have we reached a point where getting better at one thing means starting to get worse at another?
This announcement is the worst one yet.
Nerfing existing usage A more expensive top-tier plan Showing off how slow Dots is right in the demo video And GPT Space—are they telling us to use it instead of Notion or what...
Overall, throughout the entire announcement, everything OpenAI wants me to look forward to just leaves me, as a developer, disappointed.
Does anyone see the usage limits? I don't see anything indicating how much usage is in each tier.
I checked:
* https://chatgpt.com/pricing/
* https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9793128-about-chatgpt-pr...
* https://chatgpt.com/#pricing (signed in plan upgrade page)
I tried searching for "Synthetic AI Subscription" and "Synthetic Data" is such a massive keyword in AI pre-training circles it's impossible to find the company.
/rant
What is the companys URL?
If they're simultaneously cheaper than token rates but couldn't they have sold these tokens in the first place on a platform like openrouter?
And the platforms that are hosting these tokens on openrouter aren't really earning any money at all in the first place as that itself is a race to bottom (and its more so just neutral, neither positive nor loss or barely profitable) so unless synthetic is actively making loss, and if that's the case, then it might not be sustainable, I don't quite understand the economics behind it.
Is the economics behind this the fact that since its a single subscription instead of token based pricing. Some people might use less tokens than what their subscription costs and so it offsets/subsidizes the other set of people who need more tokens.
But then, this means that as you had suggested in the first place, it would be a good deal for the people who want more tokens, so they would flock even more to the platform and it should eventually balance out unless external money is being burnt as I had said earlier.
I am genuinely interested in how they make this work so I would love if someone can shine some more light to it as I would like to read more about its economics that makes it work, thanks in advance! :-D
- The way they pace and limit usage seems to echo some strategies I've seen to reduce the impact of burst usage
- They cut down the maximum context length of most models
- They claim to have some custom sauce that improves how they handle API requests and reduces error rates
- Their explanations appear focused around optimizing concurrency in the same way that the 'flex' mode of some APIs does, though I've not seen specific docs of them claiming that this is part of how they save on costs
There may be more that I haven't seen or noticed. I don't work for or with them.
So a 20x plan, that was formerly $200, would have been $4000 in API credits. Which sounds like a lot but the API is absolutely horrendously expensive - like you'll burn through $100 in 45 minutes of 5.6 Sol on High reasoning. I know this because I did this once.
I don't see any of those terms. Not even on the signed in page to upgrade to to a different Pro plan.
The plans I see are labeled, "Pro 100", "Pro 200", and "Pro 500" with the number corresponding to the price in USD.
Starting October 30, 2026, your included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex will decrease from 20 times to 10 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance. Your GPT-6 Pro limit in Chat will decrease from 200 to 100 messages per week. Your price remains unchanged and you’ll keep your current limits through October 29, 2026.
And:
For those who want even more usage and speed, the new Pro 500 tier offers our highest usage allowance, with 25 times the usage of Plus. It also includes access to Ultrafast, with up to 8 times faster token generation.