I just got an email stating that "Chat and Work are coming together in one experience". Then, half way through it's the real headline: "A shared allowance for ChatGPT and Codex". Figured it was coming at some point...
It kills me to run out of claude code usage then my much more mundane usage, queries or web searches, is also cut off. Not doing that has been a big plus of chatgpt/codex in my mind.
I just recently tried this exact thing with GPT in Codex for my Plus plan. It said it would keep an eye on usage and note down checkpoints, but it totally forgot to.
I modded my status line to show my remaining 5-hour and weekly limits, and when they reset. It's all available in the request data that comes back with every message.
I don't use Claude chat, but this is a great way to ensure my usage doesn't disappear on me.
Frankly, they could take a slice of the current quota and reserve it for non-code use and it would simultaneously be a objective downgrade but still improve the user experience.
No, because the free-tier chat is much worse than the paid-tier chat. For personal use, I only use Claude right now (I've flipped in the past as models have gotten better at different rates), but I still keep OpenAI around because paid ChatGPT is worth it as a product to me.
Same, with this change my conversational usage is going to go to zero.
I wonder what impact this will have when a sizeable chunk of developers are no longer having convos and providing feedback? Could make a noticeable difference.
I'm not going to lie, one big reason I as a researcher have been a customer of OpenAI is that on their Pro plan Pro-tier model in chat and codex are decoupled in terms of billing. Anthropic instead billed you fully. This was very useful for long mathematical reasoning for me and I could attach outputs of my simulations in the context.
I will see once this transition actually happens but if another provider offers more for less and a cost of switching is inherently low as most of project lives on the disk and not in cloud, then why not move? For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
That also has been my mode of operation. Plan + review on GPT web and implement with Codex. Bugs, logs, diffs etc are frequently sent to chat to find bugs etc. Seems they're going full agentic and also trying to close that profit gap.
Same for me, I have Claude and codex. And usage limits in codex are hit more often. what was keeping me from switching was only the chat was virtually not limited. I guess it's time to switch.
From your experience, allowance for pure chat (no agentic stuff) is more generous in Claude than in The coming ChatGPT merge? Just asking, because I'm undecided as well. I'm on chatgpt plus now and chat is 99% of my usage.
Same. I'm in the plus plan, the chat and codex/work are decoupled there and I basically never use the latter. I'll keep my subscription until the merge happens and I'll jump ship (where, tho?) if it severely limits my usage. At least it seems like "instant" is going to stay unlimited.
Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash. I can’t believe how far I’ve gone with only spending like $0.70 so far on credits
> Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash.
I'm pleasantly surprised by grok models.
We use cursor at work and i'm at the $20/month plan.
I used to mostly use Gpt, composer and occasionally opus. But this month i maxed these models quota and I've been working with Grok 4.7 essentially non stop for the last two weeks.
Grok is fairly verbose and somewhat slower but in the end it does get the job done. I've done a surprising amount of work (planning, implementing, tool usage, analysis) on the base plan.
But you still wanted to say something, didn't you?
Well, if so I'll say something too – I would feel better giving money to a company led by a man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".
Ironically enough I'm currently on a ChatGPT Pro 200 package because OpenAI has been my platform for all my serious (non-coder-guided) coding work so far.
But with this new change I might actually finally jump ship. And maybe it would be to SpaceXAI and their Grok Ultra package. That's still $200/month for me, but I would get 50x more usage compared to plus, compared to "just" 20x with ChatGPT Pro 200. It looks tempting.
Musk's main concept summarised by Gemini:
"Truth as Safety: Musk argues that the most important aspect of AI safety is ensuring the system is maximally curious and honest, even if that truth is unpopular.
Raising vs. Programming: He compares developing superintelligence to raising a child rather than strictly coding it, warning that forcing an AI to hold contradictory or untruthful principles will break its logic and make it 'insane'."
Grok is the least "honest" out there. And you should 100 % never believe anything Elon Musk says, he's one of the most clueless and unreliable people in existence.
Grok had specific baked in instructions to avoid negative statements about Musk and Trump, how is that for truth seeking? No other LLM company has done that from what I know.
> man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".
Right, fair enough since Musk and the sort of people he supports and associates with are widely know for not being the biggest liars and hypocrites in generations.
If you simply go by what he is saying, then you should also simply go by what anyone else is saying during the time Musk isn't talking. When he says he's Jesus, he's Jesus until someone else says he's not. That's as much as you can be trusted with.
When looking at the performance / price graph of artificial analysis, we can see that deepseek doesn't seem to have a better profile, just notably worse and slightly cheaper models, so in the future a chatgpt user will be better serve with switching to Luna or Terra that have better profile than deepseek.
Question from a noob who’s never used openrouter: how do you actually do stuff with it other than chatting? Their website says it’s a unified interface for every model, but then they show a list of “most popular agents” (not models) that include things like “Codex” and “Claude Code”. Which implies I’m using openrouter to access other agents/harnesses, not just models. At which point what is openrouter doing for me?
I’d naively expect openrouter to be a thing that ships with its own agent/harness and lets you pick the model that requests are sent to. But the website implies that’s not what’s happening.
> For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
OpenAI is committed to helping us find the proper valuation of our workflows and we’re committed to paying far less than the perceived value these tools bring. Reminds me of the old Oracle pricing strategy of “how much you got?”
In reality this is a non-issue because average chat conversations use 1/1000th the tokens of agentic coding usage (given they aren't reading their 1 million lines of generated code for every change), but at the same time... it should be a non-issue for OpenAI too. They talk about developing "intelligence too cheap to meter" and then go on to meter an absolutely trivial amount of usage for people already paying $100-$200 a month, embarrassing. The PR hit and psychological aversion to using ChatGPT this will instill in users will hurt them more than covering this usage could ever possibly do.
I say this working in an LLM startup where we serve literally unlimited usage (with the only caveat being that usage is serialized) via subscription and, unlike OpenAI, are actually profitable. I guess when you're hundreds of billions in the hole you're desperate to try anything to save the sinking ship, even if it clearly won't work.
Just a guess - MCP Tunnel loophole has been widely abused by the same types who kept their final session after hitting their limit open using a "fake" tool call (which unfortunately means we now all get cut off when reaching limits).
Others building harnesses around chat or simply falling back to manual copy/paste mode once hitting limits. Ironically AI makes it easy to automate the tiniest loophole to make it a problem as soon as word gets out.
It's a non-issue for everyone not trying to tokenmaxx and sticking to the spirit of subscriptions, but theoretically these folks SHOULD be on a higher tier that reflects their actual usage.
Edit: I feel like I'm coming off as a corpo sycophant defending OpenAI here... not my intention. Both big AI companies encourage this behaviour by creating complex and inconsistent rules around their plans such that it is impossible to know what a subscription is buying, a large chunk of the value coming from discretionary but quite predictably regular resets. As much as they have every right to change their plans... they got what they asked for with all the folks exploiting the loopholes. I just wonder if we'll ever get any sort of consumer law around these "mystery box" subscriptions with meaningless tiers so everyone can stop wasting energy on finding, exploiting and then fixing pricing loopholes.
We don't even have laws, against a storefront taking away your purchased shows/games/music due to a licensing issue or whatnot. Or if we do, they're clearly not enforced enough.
As for the 'mystery nature' of subscriptions; you can always pay API rates if you would like. If their API rates are too expensive, very cheap models like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, etc, are available.
There are various plugins to make ChatGPT queries in Codex, so you can use your allowance from there. I'm hoping this just closes that gap, and in reality it doesn't change anything.
Its not misusing the system at all - its accepting a level of friction and inflexibility in turn for cost savings. I've acknowledged its reasonable to change the model.
The major issue is going to be you ran your stuff dry with agents and now you are cut off from the chats. If instead, like 1% had been reserved, then you'd automatically be able to use the website and it would cut off people who set up skills to hack around it, which I suspect is why they're doing this.
This is the exact reason I stopped using claude for chatting.
Few times I hit the claude code limits I was unable to ask the simplest question in a chat.
Ah, so both Claude and Codex are going to have the same exact reduction for their two equivalent plans - 20x to 10x, at the same previous price - at the same time? I already knew about the ChatGPT announcement, but the claude one is completely new to me and completely unexpected. So much for competition...
> The reduction announced in our September 29 email is canceled. If you already had the higher Work and Codex allowance, you keep it. If you had the lower allowance, it has doubled to match. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
What I find interesting with this is that they dished out 65,000 credits to all Pro200 users as a "sorry we're doing this" but didn't take them back after this announcement.
Retail cost of $2500, would love to know their actual cost for these credits.
* 50% abandonment (since it does expire; and general prepaid credit abandonment is pretty high; especially given how much credits they dished out; so probably on the low end) = $188
Plus, it's unclear how many users opt out of training, so more usage and RLHF data on their best models from long-term power users, might work out to be a net benefit to them; since these kind of "non-abusable" (i.e. not announced beforehand) announcements don't suppress monetization as much.
Look up price versus intelligence for your favorite open model on artificial analysis and compare it with Luna, Sol, Opus, and Sonnet. Mind you, all of those are API prices, and you're still better off paying API prices than using an unsubsidized open model. Subscriptions from any of the major labs are an even better deal.
I've been using ChatGPT since release and Codex since before ChatGPT was a thing (with the original Codex model). Am I the only one who didn't realize these limits weren't already merged since the current Codex app was released?
They ought to reserve a very small amount of quota exclusively for chatgpt so it doesn't just shut off if you exhaust your quota using codex. If they don't it would make more sense to keep codex and chatgpt usage on different accounts, which I'm sure OpenAI doesn't intend to incentivize.
Sama not too long ago said the "last resort" would be ads in ChatGPT, but maybe with cutting usage, there are more last resorts left. Maybe a useful signal for shareholders on when to bail (i.e. now).
I'm not surprised. At work, we paired devs and non-devs together, and we're sharing subscriptions, since we tend to exclusively use one or the other. It's like when Copilot was billing per query rather than per token, always bound to disappear.
I've been using Chat for all my Codex/Work tasks precisely because of the fact it didn't affect usage. Slightly less convenient and smooth but still directly against GitHub repos and other connectors so fantastic value in my Plus plan.
Another reason after the recent Max shenanigans to reevaluate my sub.
All good things and token-burning workarounds come to an end...
I really think that OpenAI during this period not only can't release anything good, but is doing more and more restrictions.
And then giving a bunch of bullshit reasons that make no sense.
I think everyone should start thinking about how these AI companies that have absorbed huge amounts of money are becoming more and more evil, and develop the ability to say "We have choices."
I think it's time to make these AI companies return the resources they have occupied, and seriously reflect on themselves.
I think we should make these companies' stock prices crash, demand a pause on unreasonable AI construction, and cancel subscriptions to those AI services that are expensive as hell and control your entire system.
Embrace open source, LLMs that you can privately deploy yourself, and keep your data in your own hands.
I think China is really doing well right now, open sourcing useful models, not letting hardware prices rise crazily, and even pushing down Token prices.
As for security issues, since they're already open source, we can do Fine Tune afterward to solve these problems.
And 4, someone has done experiments showing that 4 small models can reach the level of claude fable.
I really hate those arrogant AI giant companies. They act so calm and unbothered, wanting to own everything and control everything. It's disgusting.
I'm really looking forward to China developing a cheap, non-CUDA AI machine, keeping the price around 1000 USD, a machine that can run deepseek flash level models, becoming a dedicated AI machine rather than a training machine.
Then there will no longer be Token anxiety, no need to react to all kinds of decisions made by those AI companies, and no problem of giving your data to others.
This isn’t good. I wish they would reverse it. It is easy to blow your codex usage — but then making it so CHAT is also busted is a shame. Please undo that.
The excess capacity from not using chatgpt is how they will offset their subsidised products via cost savings
IMHO, they will be seeing a slow down in growth (not total numbers) suggesting the AI bubble is about to pop, against the backdrop of their investors now oversized cash budget that is still growing.
They're souring the milk, adding the anti features now they have the captive audience.
Claude is already way superior in coding than Open AI atm. So coders are mostly using Claude
The models may switch occasionally in terms of who the class leader is in certain disciplines, but at the top level either provider is enough for professional coders.
Saying that either is only suitable for non-coders sounds gatekeepery and very out of touch.
They need to rollout a 50 dollar plan then. I often run out of codex 5h limit and this would lock me out of simple google like queries. Can't justify the 100 dollar plan while also paying for claude and having a github copilot at work.
With the way things are, they actively drive you to get another $20 subscription at a competing service, since that's the only official way you can spend $40 on AI without going the full $100.
My usage pattern is "one or two evenings a week I'll sit down late at night and do something heavy". I have a life, y'know?
Their 5 hour limit works better with a "constant background trickle" usage pattern. I don't think the $20 account is a good fit for hobbyists-who-have-day-jobs (which is where I think it should be targeted). They should have an offering that meets "binge" needs.
I would love the option to choose whether you want to use 5 hour limits or some type of burst limit where you could use all of your weekly quota. Trying to spread my work out over a day with gaps is painful and while I understand that this is some intentional friction to get people to upgrade to the $100 plan that's just never going to be justified when I'm only using this plan for hobby projects, I'm not going to pay $100 per month just because I might have the time to work on something big that month. Congestion wise, I wonder if there's any real difference to 5 hour windows vs using all your weekly quota in one chunk at some random point in the week? They allowed it for a while as what I assume was an experiment to measure that and then switched back so I guess there are some consequences to it.
Once this change comes into effect and I'm not able to use the chat side of things for more casual inquiries and ideation it'll be the motivation I need to try out Claude or Grok again. I'd rather have a second subscription with a different provider than double up on one for more of the same.
I'd say it's both intentional friction, as well as just some degree of load distribution throughout the day, instead of peak hours (US work hours).
At OpenAI/Anthropic scale, they're can't just scaling up-and-down on demand on rented autoscale GPUs (to be honest; that's not really practical anymore for even medium size volume); the peak hours are basically the same for everyone.
It's amusing how desensitized we became to AI companies charging money however they like.
Just look at this announcement: "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them. The amount of tokens you consume will depend on things you can't control". What is left unsaid is that your subscription will contain an unknown number of those tokens you can't measure anyway, and that they will change the number whenever they feel like it.
You pay for… what, exactly?
I have no idea how this kind of sale is legal, especially in jurisdictions with consumer rights protection (EU).
Not convinced those two pages help you in any substantial way to estimate your token burn rate across input/output/caching, etc.
Edit: It's some info, but not much around caching, or what context does vs just what you type in the chat, how reasoning or tool use affects cost/token burn, what control you might have on output tokens, etc.
What difference does 24 make when nobody is even sure what is being charged and some of these products burn thousands of tokens just to display a status message.
this argument does not make a ton of sense to me. would it be better if they were charging by the byte? that's fixed and you can measure/control how many bytes you send, but you still have little control over how many bytes you receive, or whether those bytes are useful in the first place.
likewise, suppose you buy a 1gb plan from a mobile isp, then you find a youtube tutorial that you're interested in. the nugget of information you need is 23 minutes in, but you have no way of knowing that upfront, it may not even be there. you can exert some control over how many bytes you send in the headers of the get requests to youtube, but you have little control over how youtube compresses the video you requested. also you download 2 30s ads and a sponsored segment before finding what you were looking for. unfortunately you're now out of data on your plan. do you blame your isp for their shady sales practices? is it youtube's fault? what did you pay for?
There is quite a lot of control over data usage on mobile phones. My current complaint is that the controls are not unified, but in many different places.
For example, on Android 17, there is Data Saver mode. Your per-app settings can control mobile data usage, in the background, or unlimited. Your WiFi networks can be individually labeled as metered, non-metered, or automatic. In the YouTube app, there are settings for your video quality, and how to adjust that quality based on your connection, if it is mobile data, or metered WiFi. YouTube Music has its own settings, and since it handles podcasts, you can opt out of video entirely.
Furthermore, there is monitoring of data usage. You can set the time period: for example, my mobile data metering resets on the 9th of the month. You can see usage for each app during that time period, split out between mobile and non-mobile data. I can set a warning threshold and a hard limit for mobile data usage.
I only use free LLMs, and not very much. I've only reached a limit once. But I do see that they have indicators or meters for usage. So perhaps check again, look harder, maybe ask your LLM how you can monitor and restrict token usage.
Its similar to an taxi ride without the customer service or refunds.
You're billed by the hour / mile, you can choose an economy vehicle type, but the Toyota driver kept getting lost, swapping out vehicles, changing the price, when you finally reach your destination, you need another top up.
> "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them
They have an open source tokenizer on GitHub, they indicate which tokenizer they use per model, and they have a simple to use website that tokenize text and visualize it.
I agree and we charge by kWh though we are constantly working to allow users to compare to various token rates or sub amounts. Token subs are all very obfuscated and I don’t feel it’s for the benefit of consumers.
In a world where the the moral equivalent of "subject to change without notice" is all but ubiquitous as a term of service, this is thoroughly unsurprising.
Most consumer protection laws can be easily satisfied by offering a full refund.
I know what I paid for: hardware and whatever value became of the global ingest of all our best software developers so atleast as we tell everyong: fuck your license, I actually have the freedom they might've wanted from it.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] threadAt the least, it deters people from spinning up Astra Pro requests via the ChatGPT interface willy-nilly.
Those were 2 flagship projects that will now make ChatGPT a lot less useful to people who pay.
We're in trouble. OAI wanted to raise $30B and raise $11B they are cutting costs.
I don't use Claude chat, but this is a great way to ensure my usage doesn't disappear on me.
I had it for a couple weeks before it disappeared. It probably decreased upgrades and monetisation too much.
The friction is intentional. Esp with the broader ‘AI trade’ showing jitters; they need good financial numbers.
I wonder what impact this will have when a sizeable chunk of developers are no longer having convos and providing feedback? Could make a noticeable difference.
I also recall reading the following: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscription...
I will see once this transition actually happens but if another provider offers more for less and a cost of switching is inherently low as most of project lives on the disk and not in cloud, then why not move? For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
I'm pleasantly surprised by grok models.
We use cursor at work and i'm at the $20/month plan.
I used to mostly use Gpt, composer and occasionally opus. But this month i maxed these models quota and I've been working with Grok 4.7 essentially non stop for the last two weeks.
Grok is fairly verbose and somewhat slower but in the end it does get the job done. I've done a surprising amount of work (planning, implementing, tool usage, analysis) on the base plan.
Well, if so I'll say something too – I would feel better giving money to a company led by a man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".
Ironically enough I'm currently on a ChatGPT Pro 200 package because OpenAI has been my platform for all my serious (non-coder-guided) coding work so far.
But with this new change I might actually finally jump ship. And maybe it would be to SpaceXAI and their Grok Ultra package. That's still $200/month for me, but I would get 50x more usage compared to plus, compared to "just" 20x with ChatGPT Pro 200. It looks tempting.
Musk's main concept summarised by Gemini: "Truth as Safety: Musk argues that the most important aspect of AI safety is ensuring the system is maximally curious and honest, even if that truth is unpopular.
Raising vs. Programming: He compares developing superintelligence to raising a child rather than strictly coding it, warning that forcing an AI to hold contradictory or untruthful principles will break its logic and make it 'insane'."
Grok had specific baked in instructions to avoid negative statements about Musk and Trump, how is that for truth seeking? No other LLM company has done that from what I know.
DeepSeek’s Winnie-the-Pooh Problem (Feb 2025) - https://medium.com/humanai/deepseeks-winnie-the-pooh-problem...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...
Everyone claims to be interested in the truth. Ideologically driven political agitators are not particularly credible on that point though.
Right, fair enough since Musk and the sort of people he supports and associates with are widely know for not being the biggest liars and hypocrites in generations.
Elon Musk has likely done irreparable harm to my country. Harm that undoes generations of progress and sacrifice by people I've loved dearly.
I do wish that more people cared and it's supremely disappointing to me that they don't.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2022/11/14/twitter-engin...
If you simply go by what he is saying, then you should also simply go by what anyone else is saying during the time Musk isn't talking. When he says he's Jesus, he's Jesus until someone else says he's not. That's as much as you can be trusted with.
OP is not even demanding others to adopt it, so I don't see why it rubs people like this.
For small evaluation ds is impressive.
I’d naively expect openrouter to be a thing that ships with its own agent/harness and lets you pick the model that requests are sent to. But the website implies that’s not what’s happening.
OpenAI is committed to helping us find the proper valuation of our workflows and we’re committed to paying far less than the perceived value these tools bring. Reminds me of the old Oracle pricing strategy of “how much you got?”
I say this working in an LLM startup where we serve literally unlimited usage (with the only caveat being that usage is serialized) via subscription and, unlike OpenAI, are actually profitable. I guess when you're hundreds of billions in the hole you're desperate to try anything to save the sinking ship, even if it clearly won't work.
Others building harnesses around chat or simply falling back to manual copy/paste mode once hitting limits. Ironically AI makes it easy to automate the tiniest loophole to make it a problem as soon as word gets out.
It's a non-issue for everyone not trying to tokenmaxx and sticking to the spirit of subscriptions, but theoretically these folks SHOULD be on a higher tier that reflects their actual usage.
Edit: I feel like I'm coming off as a corpo sycophant defending OpenAI here... not my intention. Both big AI companies encourage this behaviour by creating complex and inconsistent rules around their plans such that it is impossible to know what a subscription is buying, a large chunk of the value coming from discretionary but quite predictably regular resets. As much as they have every right to change their plans... they got what they asked for with all the folks exploiting the loopholes. I just wonder if we'll ever get any sort of consumer law around these "mystery box" subscriptions with meaningless tiers so everyone can stop wasting energy on finding, exploiting and then fixing pricing loopholes.
As for the 'mystery nature' of subscriptions; you can always pay API rates if you would like. If their API rates are too expensive, very cheap models like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, etc, are available.
We use Chat precisely because of that!
It's not unreasonable for them to switch but you really should not be so dismissive, this will likely have a massive effect on many.
This is a way of misusing the system and taking away GPU from people who are paying for metered work and the quotas became unsustainable.
So happy to have the open models!
https://x.com/JesusIsGod/status/2116228727059411248 am I misinterpreting? Or was it always 10x? Everything is so vague, no wonder they call it "vibe-coding" :)
> The reduction announced in our September 29 email is canceled. If you already had the higher Work and Codex allowance, you keep it. If you had the lower allowance, it has doubled to match. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
Retail cost of $2500, would love to know their actual cost for these credits.
* 85% inference margins = $375
* 50% abandonment (since it does expire; and general prepaid credit abandonment is pretty high; especially given how much credits they dished out; so probably on the low end) = $188
Plus, it's unclear how many users opt out of training, so more usage and RLHF data on their best models from long-term power users, might work out to be a net benefit to them; since these kind of "non-abusable" (i.e. not announced beforehand) announcements don't suppress monetization as much.
I've been using Chat for all my Codex/Work tasks precisely because of the fact it didn't affect usage. Slightly less convenient and smooth but still directly against GitHub repos and other connectors so fantastic value in my Plus plan.
Another reason after the recent Max shenanigans to reevaluate my sub.
All good things and token-burning workarounds come to an end...
And then giving a bunch of bullshit reasons that make no sense.
I think everyone should start thinking about how these AI companies that have absorbed huge amounts of money are becoming more and more evil, and develop the ability to say "We have choices."
I think it's time to make these AI companies return the resources they have occupied, and seriously reflect on themselves.
I think we should make these companies' stock prices crash, demand a pause on unreasonable AI construction, and cancel subscriptions to those AI services that are expensive as hell and control your entire system.
Embrace open source, LLMs that you can privately deploy yourself, and keep your data in your own hands.
I think China is really doing well right now, open sourcing useful models, not letting hardware prices rise crazily, and even pushing down Token prices.
As for security issues, since they're already open source, we can do Fine Tune afterward to solve these problems.
And 4, someone has done experiments showing that 4 small models can reach the level of claude fable.
I really hate those arrogant AI giant companies. They act so calm and unbothered, wanting to own everything and control everything. It's disgusting.
I'm really looking forward to China developing a cheap, non-CUDA AI machine, keeping the price around 1000 USD, a machine that can run deepseek flash level models, becoming a dedicated AI machine rather than a training machine.
Then there will no longer be Token anxiety, no need to react to all kinds of decisions made by those AI companies, and no problem of giving your data to others.
It's time, brothers.
Other people also have that choice and many choose differently from you, but no one’s taken your choice away.
IMHO, they will be seeing a slow down in growth (not total numbers) suggesting the AI bubble is about to pop, against the backdrop of their investors now oversized cash budget that is still growing.
They're souring the milk, adding the anti features now they have the captive audience.
With this change even non-coders will jump ship. Not sure why OpenAI is doing this now. They should improve their models now to match the competition.
The models may switch occasionally in terms of who the class leader is in certain disciplines, but at the top level either provider is enough for professional coders.
Saying that either is only suitable for non-coders sounds gatekeepery and very out of touch.
Might affect go and Plus users.
Their 5 hour limit works better with a "constant background trickle" usage pattern. I don't think the $20 account is a good fit for hobbyists-who-have-day-jobs (which is where I think it should be targeted). They should have an offering that meets "binge" needs.
Once this change comes into effect and I'm not able to use the chat side of things for more casual inquiries and ideation it'll be the motivation I need to try out Claude or Grok again. I'd rather have a second subscription with a different provider than double up on one for more of the same.
At OpenAI/Anthropic scale, they're can't just scaling up-and-down on demand on rented autoscale GPUs (to be honest; that's not really practical anymore for even medium size volume); the peak hours are basically the same for everyone.
Just look at this announcement: "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them. The amount of tokens you consume will depend on things you can't control". What is left unsaid is that your subscription will contain an unknown number of those tokens you can't measure anyway, and that they will change the number whenever they feel like it.
You pay for… what, exactly?
I have no idea how this kind of sale is legal, especially in jurisdictions with consumer rights protection (EU).
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Edit: It's some info, but not much around caching, or what context does vs just what you type in the chat, how reasoning or tool use affects cost/token burn, what control you might have on output tokens, etc.
It should be megatokens.
likewise, suppose you buy a 1gb plan from a mobile isp, then you find a youtube tutorial that you're interested in. the nugget of information you need is 23 minutes in, but you have no way of knowing that upfront, it may not even be there. you can exert some control over how many bytes you send in the headers of the get requests to youtube, but you have little control over how youtube compresses the video you requested. also you download 2 30s ads and a sponsored segment before finding what you were looking for. unfortunately you're now out of data on your plan. do you blame your isp for their shady sales practices? is it youtube's fault? what did you pay for?
For example, on Android 17, there is Data Saver mode. Your per-app settings can control mobile data usage, in the background, or unlimited. Your WiFi networks can be individually labeled as metered, non-metered, or automatic. In the YouTube app, there are settings for your video quality, and how to adjust that quality based on your connection, if it is mobile data, or metered WiFi. YouTube Music has its own settings, and since it handles podcasts, you can opt out of video entirely.
Furthermore, there is monitoring of data usage. You can set the time period: for example, my mobile data metering resets on the 9th of the month. You can see usage for each app during that time period, split out between mobile and non-mobile data. I can set a warning threshold and a hard limit for mobile data usage.
I only use free LLMs, and not very much. I've only reached a limit once. But I do see that they have indicators or meters for usage. So perhaps check again, look harder, maybe ask your LLM how you can monitor and restrict token usage.
You're billed by the hour / mile, you can choose an economy vehicle type, but the Toyota driver kept getting lost, swapping out vehicles, changing the price, when you finally reach your destination, you need another top up.
They have an open source tokenizer on GitHub, they indicate which tokenizer they use per model, and they have a simple to use website that tokenize text and visualize it.
Most consumer protection laws can be easily satisfied by offering a full refund.