So many negative comments here. Among my circle, it’s not uncommon for people to have multiple $200 accounts. This seems like it would make things easier for them by letting them use one account instead of juggling two or more.
What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me. But these users absolutely do exist.
For less than the cost of this plan, you can get ChatGPT Pro 200, Claude Max 5x, and Kimi Code. At least that's what I'm doing, and the model diversity does help with adversarial code review loops.
At this point, why even bother with subscriptions and other packaged products of these model providers anyways. It’s just an extra hassle of juggling between them plus it introduces additional data privacy concerns.
Do things in a sustainable fashion and treat these models like the swappable commodity that they are by using them via abstraction layers. Bonus point is that you might be surprised how much more you can get for your money by intelligently optimizing specific model usage.
Subscriptions are still subsidized over API, so just like Uber I'll continue to milk them until I can't anymore (Uber back in the 2010s was incredible, you could get damn near anywhere for less than 5 bucks or so).
The drivers are still contractors and get very little of the ride money unless demand is high. Uber has been very successful at legislating carveouts for rideshare drivers to protect its margins.
“Over time, we see prices go low enough that it makes sense for most to buy usage as needed without there being a significant gap between what you get in a subscription and what you get in the API for a dollar spent.”
Your concern is legit. Pro is a personal plan under OpenAI's consumer privacy policy: "When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT, Sora, or Operator, we may use your content to train our models." As for the API it goes under the business one: "By default, we do not use your business data for training our models."
Claude has the same personal-professional split. Free, pro and Max have trained by default since Anthropic's policy change in August 2025. API and team plans didn't. Choosing between one and another is also choosing a training default. The subscriptions offers the opt-out setting, Data Controls for ChatGPT and Account settings for Claude, and it's worth checking before paying.
This approach is fun and rewarding but I think it makes sense to do this if/when models really stall out. Right now opus 5.5 is... amazing. I wouldn't use anything else.
Yikes. I'm not the poster you're responding to, but
1. In this absolutely wild era of model progress, with frontier and near frontier models leapfrogging themselves seemingly on a weekly basis it's good to get experience with a variety of providers
2. This isn't exactly hard with OpenRouter!
3. I've had very good results having models from one provider critique plans and code written by models from another provider. Can't do that without subs to at least two providers
> What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me. But these users absolutely do exist.
I think you can just become slightly careless and off it goes. I just have a £20/mo ChatGPT and I'm getting it to do some HomeLab Kubernetes YAML for me that I have no desire to hand-type. I asked it a question and it zoomed off looking at all sorts of websites, running various git commands, doing anything except asking me for an answer to a question.
It ran through about 60% of my 5-hour allocation in those few minutes, which was an unheard-of rate for me before that, and I can imagine if I had zillions of tokens available I just wouldn't have noticed. As it is, my AGENTS.md now exists and is fairly stern.
Latest models have a much better sense of time and token budget, so if you instruct it for a quick answer or to not burn many tokens it will try to respect that
Can you please explain to me how the announcement is anything but a negative? Especially for such power users. That same 200$ plan now allows for half the usage it did when I subscribed a couple weeks ago. Tibo and co can dress this pig up however they want, it's still less usage than I bargained for.
Yeah… i have multiple $200 Claude accounts and a supergrok heavy account and also a max $500. The max $500 was a new addition today, but i have my whole company basically wired and ran by ai with a central HQ setup. While the $1k month price is high, that $1k gives me the equivalent of a full dev team working 24/7. Pretty soon we’ll need more horsepower and will move to a model like kimi 3 or local hosting our own model. Thats something i still have to learn more about. But yeah, build a system where you can swap any model or ai platform in and out easily
Would you ask the same thing if they happened to employ a single quality software developer? Can you imagine paying said developer 12k a year and expect them to deliver? How about a personal tutor who you have access to 24/?
I've been dropping the equivalent of a car payment for three months and it's been worth every single penny; even if I never actually sell a product.
It was originally a small project in scope, just a basic GameBoy emulator, a shader VM, and some Azure integrations. Just a bunch of things I wanted to dabble with in order to learn and have fun. Over the past few months it has grown immensely into something resembling an operating system more than a toy engine. There's even a custom DSL for authoring worlds that abstracts over the state/rendering models; it's completely ridiculous!
Will I make any money off the thing? Probably not, don't care. The things I've learned along the way have been worth way more than the amount of money I burned on a few monthly subscriptions. Learning how to interact with agents and treat them like a team was worth it alone; the product I have now is simply a nice bonus.
>What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me.
What intrigues me more is how are they not done building whatever they were building? LLMs have been jaw-droppingly good for a good 6 months now.
The people spending thousands on LLM bills a month should've been done building significant chunks of Microsoft's or Google's software portfolio by now.
I guess what I mean is how is producing code still the limiting factor in whatever they're doing?
I produce a firehose of personal software and I still cannot max out a $20 plan.
It's actually insane how often I switch between Anthropic and Codex subscriptions. The experience on these platforms is a bit like riding a roller coaster.
I don’t think it’s the individual with a single account that precipitated this change, it’s the users with many, many 20x accounts. Anthropic is less clear on their limits, but they have never given bonus usage, so again OpenAI is the late follower (as with adding a 5x plan).
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.
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.
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.
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.
They also said this in the email announcement I got:
> As a thank you for being an existing subscriber and to help you continue to build your most ambitious ideas and transition, we’re also giving you a one-time grant of 62,500 usage credits (a $2,500 USD value). You’ll see these appear in Settings > Usage. They will expire on December 31, 2026, and use of the credits is governed by the Service Credit Terms.
I have no idea how much 62,500 usage credits are. Given the value they suggest I feel it's like one extra week of usage.
> Given the value they suggest I feel it's like one extra week of usage.
With how many resets they've been giving out lately, if you consistently max things out I would say this is a reasonable guess. You can ask your clanker via your favorite harness (the usage credits are equivalent to API pricing):
> Based on my session files and official OpenAI API pricing, check how much I would have spent in the past few months if I switched to the OpenAI API.
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.
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 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
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’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.
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).
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)
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.
Pricing decisions are important; you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200 just because you don't have the hardware resources to manage all of the workload.
I've been paying for the PRO200 plan since day one, and I've never used it that much because Claude Code was and still is better at coding. I didn't even complain when they started nerfing their models.
I love OpenAI, but they should do better on such important decisions, knowing that all other companies are waiting for such missteps.
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.
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.
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.
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, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. 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's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
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.
For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive 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.
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.
Edit to be fair: the "500 minus tax write off" comment does make sense but often people overstates the benefits of writing things off.
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.
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.
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.
Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.
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 $5 a month Gemini (Google has enough money as Meta to make it free) subscription.
Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!
Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.
If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. It's like gmail is free, but Google is harvesting all of my data to sell me ads. Meta is doing the same with Muse.
You can use open weights models right now and ignore all this fuss. And by the time open weights models are objectively and subjectively on par with what Fable/Astra are today, the frontier labs will probably offer something newer, more capable and more expensive. The models OpenAI and Anthropic roll out clearly aren’t for people on a strict budget.
Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?
How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.
On what tokens? The ones of today's model, or tomorrow's?
The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.
Are you serious? If you used 10$ of your subscription until 10th of month and then prices changed, well, the rest of your subscription uses new prices, that's basic math.
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.
Honestly I think the amount of value from today's frontier models is already easily at that level. And really, these models have enough knowledge and accuracy to rival the output of even very experienced engineers -- once we have better harnesses that can keep them from going off the rails without babysitting, they're coming for the $300K salaries.
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.
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).
Totally disagree. Newer models are doing much more advanced things in domains like math, programming, and cybersecurity.
I don't see why a company charging more for less is a surprise or would lead to thinking that AI models have reached their limits. Thats an incredible claim and it would need incredible evidence. Astra is much more capable than Luna. Luna being 'good enough' for most of my daily work just shows how strong Luna is, not that Astra isn't much more capable.
As models get more and more capable, they will only appear to be at the extremes. You'll need to see them solving more Millenium problems to notice a difference as the tide is continuously raised for all models as well.
We must keep in mind, that even the 500 plan is not cost-covering for many users. Heavy users squeezing everything out of it. It is like the Internet-fees in the end 90s. The flat-rate was not cost-covering by heavy users and I think these plans are only used by heavy users.
Maybe we really come to an end of cheap KI and we will use all an mac studio m10 in a few years.
We have to assume that OpenAI knows how to math. Given that the plans all scale usage equally now the benefit of the 500 plan is only for OpenAI. Enough of a percentage of users don't squeeze everything of plans every single month that this profits them more.
That's what I was doing with my Pro 200 plan, except sometimes life gets in the way and I had couple weeks where I couldn't.
OpenAI must have statistics on what percentage of people with Pro accounts don't maximize the usage in a given. Even if it a very small percentage that is still income for providing nothing.
When you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous that the usage credit is use-it-or-lose it. It really should roll over.
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.
> 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.
Got it, calendar updated: switch back to Claude on the 29th.
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel the FTC should start looking at things like this. If a well funded company can bait the market long enough to drown most everyone else out then double their price overnight (ok, 30 days..) doesn't competition just become a matter of who has the deepest pockets?
We used to break up companies (standard oil, american tobacco, both over 100 years ago) for predatory pricing, because it's illegal monopolization. The supreme court raised the standard of proof in '93 (Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson), you have to prove that the defendant sold below cost and that they stand a reasonable chance of recouping those losses, a test which most attempted predatory pricing suits fail these days. So it's pretty much the dominant strategy now- American Airlines got away with it, Walmart got away with it, Amazon got away with it, Uber got away with it many times, and now OpenAI will get away with it.
Could hire real people in India for this cost - Fresh college under grads are paid like $250 per month or less for a month working 9hours x 5.5 to 6 days.
Edit: I meant its not worth it just for Dots Personal assistant ,also comparing to previous pricing of $200 - For $500 you got previously 5x more than previous $200 Pro pricing (which was 20x now is 10x). I can have real people who can drive or do physical deliveries etc, just on the delta.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
At this price points (including the reduction of usage on the Pro 200 and Pro 100 subscriptions), more people will be looking buying their own hardware and running with open weight AIs. $6000 per year is the threshold
Does it matter when I burn through all my Fable subscription usage in about a day? Astra is much better on efficiency, but doesn’t last a week either. With the new subscription limits, it’ll end up being like Fable.
never did i think SWE would adopt MLM pay-to-play tactics, but here we are in 2026 with companies asking people to pay them $500/mo to rent their brains back to them!
$6k a year on the top monthly rolling subscription vs buying a Mac…
There’s an extra 20% of sales tax on that subscription cost in the U.K., but that’s a different matter entirely
> 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.
Everyone happily paid the way for the behemoth that squeezed everyone out of competition and then started recoup the ROI aggressively, and no one recognizes oneself as a part of the problem, just like in the current AI pandemonium.
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.
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.
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...
So Anthropic releases the best model since sliced bread, and in response OpenAI cuts their usage limits in half after releasing an absolutely atrocious sol-6 version? They seem to have lost the plot entirely.
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
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.
I've been an OpenAI booster since for a while they've been less user/community hostile and culty than Anthropic, and their models have been competitive and more pleasant/honest to work with while being much more efficient, but between this and the edge Opus 5.5 has I'm switching, sadly.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
So many negative comments here. Among my circle, it’s not uncommon for people to have multiple $200 accounts. This seems like it would make things easier for them by letting them use one account instead of juggling two or more.
What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me. But these users absolutely do exist.
What do you mean? It's the fact that previously the 20x plan cost $200 (and is 10x now) and now 25x is $500.
If it was a 50x $500 plan it would be a different story.
For less than the cost of this plan, you can get ChatGPT Pro 200, Claude Max 5x, and Kimi Code. At least that's what I'm doing, and the model diversity does help with adversarial code review loops.
At this point, why even bother with subscriptions and other packaged products of these model providers anyways. It’s just an extra hassle of juggling between them plus it introduces additional data privacy concerns.
Do things in a sustainable fashion and treat these models like the swappable commodity that they are by using them via abstraction layers. Bonus point is that you might be surprised how much more you can get for your money by intelligently optimizing specific model usage.
Subscriptions are still subsidized over API, so just like Uber I'll continue to milk them until I can't anymore (Uber back in the 2010s was incredible, you could get damn near anywhere for less than 5 bucks or so).
> Uber back in the 2010s was incredible, you could get damn near anywhere for less than 5 bucks or so
Back then the trips were subsidised by VC money, and also the drivers were contractors, so far lower internal costs for Uber.
The drivers are still contractors and get very little of the ride money unless demand is high. Uber has been very successful at legislating carveouts for rideshare drivers to protect its margins.
Correct, just as AI companies now are subsidized by VC money.
That’s the point from Tibo’s tweet:
“Over time, we see prices go low enough that it makes sense for most to buy usage as needed without there being a significant gap between what you get in a subscription and what you get in the API for a dollar spent.”
If you actually consume all quota for every session subscriptions are VASTLY cheaper per token than API.
Your concern is legit. Pro is a personal plan under OpenAI's consumer privacy policy: "When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT, Sora, or Operator, we may use your content to train our models." As for the API it goes under the business one: "By default, we do not use your business data for training our models."
Claude has the same personal-professional split. Free, pro and Max have trained by default since Anthropic's policy change in August 2025. API and team plans didn't. Choosing between one and another is also choosing a training default. The subscriptions offers the opt-out setting, Data Controls for ChatGPT and Account settings for Claude, and it's worth checking before paying.
This approach is fun and rewarding but I think it makes sense to do this if/when models really stall out. Right now opus 5.5 is... amazing. I wouldn't use anything else.
Agreed. In my testing yesterday GPT 6 Sol still beat Opus 5.5 on code review (of GPT written code in this case)
6.1 will probably perform even better.
Opus 5.5 is better in that regard than Fable 5.1 except for some bugs with more complexity which it was uniquely suited to.
> For less than the cost of this plan, you can get ChatGPT Pro 200, Claude Max 5x, and Kimi Code.
Be a better friend to yourself. Value your time more.
Yikes. I'm not the poster you're responding to, but
1. In this absolutely wild era of model progress, with frontier and near frontier models leapfrogging themselves seemingly on a weekly basis it's good to get experience with a variety of providers
2. This isn't exactly hard with OpenRouter!
3. I've had very good results having models from one provider critique plans and code written by models from another provider. Can't do that without subs to at least two providers
> What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me. But these users absolutely do exist.
I think you can just become slightly careless and off it goes. I just have a £20/mo ChatGPT and I'm getting it to do some HomeLab Kubernetes YAML for me that I have no desire to hand-type. I asked it a question and it zoomed off looking at all sorts of websites, running various git commands, doing anything except asking me for an answer to a question.
It ran through about 60% of my 5-hour allocation in those few minutes, which was an unheard-of rate for me before that, and I can imagine if I had zillions of tokens available I just wouldn't have noticed. As it is, my AGENTS.md now exists and is fairly stern.
Latest models have a much better sense of time and token budget, so if you instruct it for a quick answer or to not burn many tokens it will try to respect that
Can you please explain to me how the announcement is anything but a negative? Especially for such power users. That same 200$ plan now allows for half the usage it did when I subscribed a couple weeks ago. Tibo and co can dress this pig up however they want, it's still less usage than I bargained for.
Seems like can still do the same, but for multiple $500 because it awfully smells like ye olde $200 one.
No, now they need multiple $500 accounts. The usage allowance didn't go up significantly, just the price.
Yeah… i have multiple $200 Claude accounts and a supergrok heavy account and also a max $500. The max $500 was a new addition today, but i have my whole company basically wired and ran by ai with a central HQ setup. While the $1k month price is high, that $1k gives me the equivalent of a full dev team working 24/7. Pretty soon we’ll need more horsepower and will move to a model like kimi 3 or local hosting our own model. Thats something i still have to learn more about. But yeah, build a system where you can swap any model or ai platform in and out easily
If it's $1000 per month on subscriptions to make $1M in revenue and that's your full development team working 24x7; good deal.
If it's $1000 per month to make $0 because you haven't found PMF, less obviously a good deal unless you have a pathway to revenue?
Obviously
... why? what could you possibly be building that requires that much subsidized token spend?
Would you ask the same thing if they happened to employ a single quality software developer? Can you imagine paying said developer 12k a year and expect them to deliver? How about a personal tutor who you have access to 24/?
I've been dropping the equivalent of a car payment for three months and it's been worth every single penny; even if I never actually sell a product.
you haven't answered the question: what are you using it _for_, and _how_ are you using that many tokens per month?
Fair, I'm personally using it to play with the toy game engine project that I've been messing around with over the past 15+ years.
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck
It was originally a small project in scope, just a basic GameBoy emulator, a shader VM, and some Azure integrations. Just a bunch of things I wanted to dabble with in order to learn and have fun. Over the past few months it has grown immensely into something resembling an operating system more than a toy engine. There's even a custom DSL for authoring worlds that abstracts over the state/rendering models; it's completely ridiculous!
Will I make any money off the thing? Probably not, don't care. The things I've learned along the way have been worth way more than the amount of money I burned on a few monthly subscriptions. Learning how to interact with agents and treat them like a team was worth it alone; the product I have now is simply a nice bonus.
Mostly openclaw/muse is my understanding
the top 0.1% of the AI Engineers
>What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me.
What intrigues me more is how are they not done building whatever they were building? LLMs have been jaw-droppingly good for a good 6 months now.
The people spending thousands on LLM bills a month should've been done building significant chunks of Microsoft's or Google's software portfolio by now.
I guess what I mean is how is producing code still the limiting factor in whatever they're doing?
I produce a firehose of personal software and I still cannot max out a $20 plan.
https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck
Scope creep? When you give a mouse a cookie and all that...
Because you would still need to output Google scale software every time you need to make meaningful changes.
For me it's an autonomous research loop that runs 24/7.
What are you building with your $20 plan? Small scripts?
And what are you building? An Azure competitor? You get really far on $20.
Jevon's Paradox.
It's actually insane how often I switch between Anthropic and Codex subscriptions. The experience on these platforms is a bit like riding a roller coaster.
ChatGPT Plus: 1x usage, $20
Pro 100: 5x usage, $100
Pro 200: 10x usage, $200 (previously was 20x usage, $200)
Pro 500: 25x usage, $500
So, essentially scaling is equal. You get the same amount of usage from 25 ChatGPT Pro accounts as you do from one Pro 500 account.
It's fair, but a big of a rug pull considering how good of a deal Pro 200 was.
I stayed with the 200 plan because of how good a deal it was and because it didn't scale equally.
Now it makes more sense to get 100 plans from both Claude and ChatGPT plan to get diverse models.
It's like OpenAI wants me to give them less money or they are constrained on compute and need to shed load.
I don’t think it’s the individual with a single account that precipitated this change, it’s the users with many, many 20x accounts. Anthropic is less clear on their limits, but they have never given bonus usage, so again OpenAI is the late follower (as with adding a 5x plan).
I think the bottom one is called "Plus", right? I get that confused too.
I think you're right
> See the pricing page for a comparison of the features and usage included in each plan.
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)
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.
Do you see the terms, "10x", "20x", or "25x"? If so, where?
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.
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.
These days it's all like "$200 plan has more usage than $100 plan" and "$500 plan has even more usage".
It’s about time for some laws against unpredictable pricing like that.
Just pay the token rate for Kimi-K3 or GLM 5.3.
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.
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.
What a terrible name...
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?
https://synthetic.new
Clownpenis.fart - A name you can trust.
Those are not mutually exclusive things. I actually sympathize with voting with your wallet.
GLM has actual usage indicated on their website. From what I can see it is accurate.
They also said this in the email announcement I got:
> As a thank you for being an existing subscriber and to help you continue to build your most ambitious ideas and transition, we’re also giving you a one-time grant of 62,500 usage credits (a $2,500 USD value). You’ll see these appear in Settings > Usage. They will expire on December 31, 2026, and use of the credits is governed by the Service Credit Terms.
I have no idea how much 62,500 usage credits are. Given the value they suggest I feel it's like one extra week of usage.
> Given the value they suggest I feel it's like one extra week of usage.
With how many resets they've been giving out lately, if you consistently max things out I would say this is a reasonable guess. You can ask your clanker via your favorite harness (the usage credits are equivalent to API pricing):
> Based on my session files and official OpenAI API pricing, check how much I would have spent in the past few months if I switched to the OpenAI API.
I'm approaching $1M all-time, It's crazy.
Since February
Reading the original post and replies on X is hilarious https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
Alternative https://nitter.xitter.cc/thsottiaux/status/21048238120429407...
Lowering usage limits, increasing price.
This is just the beginning. Migrate to open models ASAP.
Migrating takes minutes, no need to do the changeover to worse local models until the situation is truly dire.
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.
lol, that ship sailed years ago
Heh, good luck with hardware. Will bankrupt you at current prices.
They are desparate to ban open models.
lol how
They started yesterday. Announced right around the same time that GLM enables cyber threats or some nonsense.
Apparently they don't want to compete now that they're doubling the costs.
just make it illegal? "open models are as bad as CSAM"
Can you recommend good and capable open models? Where does one go? OpenRouter or someplace else?
GLM-5.3, Kimi K3. OpenRouter is good for figuring out which provider you want with the serving precision that you need.
People complained about burning their weekly usage in a day on Pro 200, so OpenAI's response to that is an even more expensive plan?
Way easier to do with Anthropic plans, but I guess subsidized AI is over? Didn’t think it was happening this soon.
...while halving the limits on the $200 plan.
It's funny how, just before that, they tactfully cut the limits on the $200 subscription.
Been doing it slowly for months week over week allowances have been getting cut by 5-10% consistently
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 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...
Horrid value.
Previous $200 tier: 20x pro value
New $200 tier: 10x
New $500 tier: 25x, plus ultrafast mode but it drains 6x the cost (!!)
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’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.
There’s Discords dedicated to local hosting or check out level1tech forums. Anyone there will gladly help you with your budget and use cases.
You and everyone else
They did grandfather the usage of the $200 plans for now. Only reason I haven't cancelled yet.
This is temporary.
Yeah, until the end of October. Kinda hoping they'll pull an Anthropic and keep extending it.
Where do you see that? I can't even see the $500 plan on their pricing page.
The $500 25x was mentioned by Altman on the livestream
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.
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).
Because it is still cheaper than API usage, and more convenient than multiple subscriptions.
The pricing is on the linked page but does not appear to be selectable in ChatGPT UI yet.
The plan page just says "More usage" it doesn't say any 10x multiplier. Literally just says "More" than plus.
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.
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.
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 $200 Pro plan for the last two weeks or so)
To be fair the new models are likely 2x as expensive as before
Supposedly much less expensive per task (more token efficient and cheaper)
What? So I have 2 200$ 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.
> 500$ is a old 200$ plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast?
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.
Their audacity is shocking. Tibo posted a wall of text on X rationalizing this nonsense and I couldn't bring myself to read a single word.
Half the 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.
I checked it's actually awful lol
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.
Yeah, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
"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!"
Usage limit is - limiting. I may not notice the increased value of a more advanced model, but I will notice when I can't even use the service.
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.
What a strange idea to name your product after it's price.
It's even stranger here in the EU.
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.
Also crazy that they're asking for more euros despite the euro being more valuable than usd
It makes it easier to change the plan features if the name is tied to the price and not the features.
So expect further downgrades in the plan features for the same price.
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.
Venture capital doesn't want to pay for our tokens anymore, it seems
dangit, I've been loving the subsidies.
Pricing decisions are important; you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200 just because you don't have the hardware resources to manage all of the workload.
I've been paying for the PRO200 plan since day one, and I've never used it that much because Claude Code was and still is better at coding. I didn't even complain when they started nerfing their models.
I love OpenAI, but they should do better on such important decisions, knowing that all other companies are waiting for such missteps.
Am I just out of touch with our times if I think hand-wavey usage limits on a 500$ subscription is crazy?
It filter to people/organizations who have a hand-wavey relationship with $500.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math
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, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. 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's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve
Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?
Or does it just refuse to try?
Do you know about AutoSlash?
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.
That's actually intriguing.
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?
Well, that was fun while it lasted:)
Fuck, that's smart. Thank you for the idea.
all of this exists for cheap without AI
What APIs do you use for this?
For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive 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.
Does ChatGPT have the same large enterprise restrictions as Claude, where teams above a certain size are required to use API billing?
That would limit the $500 plan to smaller businesses.
Usage is sus but 500 minus tax write off to even a one person business that makes 100-500k yr. not crazy at all - kinda expected.
Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.
I had no idea that was originally from seinfeld! The Schitts Creek version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ&t=26s
Lol, I could hear this vividly in Kramer's voice in my mind. Not everything in the show aged well, but it's still a fun watch.
Hah we both thought of dialogue play - figured it would make for an interesting conversation.
haha one of my favorites!
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:
More than an hour after I wrote this, OAI sent an email sounding eerily close to my approximation:
Things I hadn’t anticipated: 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.
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.
Half (or more?) of the point of writing docs is for you to understand the system better.
I bet it's worth it, for him.
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.
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.
You can also right off actual $6000 hardware
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.
Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.
Since 2025 in the U.S. computer hardware qualifies for 100% depreciation in its first year of service.
You might be able to use the accelerated depreciation schedule which is 100% first year
M5 ultra wait time just went from 4 to 8 weeks over the weekend. Can't wait that long.
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.
Maybe they're trying to milk as much as they can before open-weight models cause the prices to come crashing down?
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?
Im surprised some countries dont have consumer protection laws that would force them to be more explicit/accurate
but to do accurate billing, they would have to tell us when our usage triggers a guard rail and causes our query to be rerouted or denied.
And if they do that accurately, there's no stopping someone from mapping the guard rails.
Clearly that outcome is more uncomfortable than what we have now, which is enough people seem to be okay with vague billing.
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?
Move fast and bill things
or they could simply remove the annoying guardrails
How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.
Very easily, they do it for their API. You just set a limit in tokens.
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.
Just say you get $100 of credit and different models cost different rates.
Are you serious? If you used 10$ of your subscription until 10th of month and then prices changed, well, the rest of your subscription uses new prices, that's basic math.
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Typically when a product is named x500 then one could assume its at 500 level or you are getting 500 of something.
I think this is the first instance where it means you are actually paying 500$
I think that 100$ subscription is expensive but I'm just European peasant developer, not SF area oligarch.
Yes, you are. All of this was obvious from the start. The prices will go up way more soon (tm)
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
Great naming scheme that doesn’t even survive exchange rates, or future price changes.
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.
Just keep cutting existing plans and introducing more expensive ones that give you the same thing the cheaper ones did.
Makes perfect sense.
(If you're an idiot)
For a second I was worried I somehow missed 490 versions.
exactly
To those balking at the price: this is just the beginning.
Subscription pricing will eventually compete with labor costs
It was clear from day one. This will end up at ~junior developer CTE / month. 2-3k/month incoming.
Honestly I think the amount of value from today's frontier models is already easily at that level. And really, these models have enough knowledge and accuracy to rival the output of even very experienced engineers -- once we have better harnesses that can keep them from going off the rails without babysitting, they're coming for the $300K salaries.
Is AI development hitting its limits?
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.
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).
Totally disagree. Newer models are doing much more advanced things in domains like math, programming, and cybersecurity.
I don't see why a company charging more for less is a surprise or would lead to thinking that AI models have reached their limits. Thats an incredible claim and it would need incredible evidence. Astra is much more capable than Luna. Luna being 'good enough' for most of my daily work just shows how strong Luna is, not that Astra isn't much more capable.
As models get more and more capable, they will only appear to be at the extremes. You'll need to see them solving more Millenium problems to notice a difference as the tide is continuously raised for all models as well.
This is only for people who haven’t personally used deepseek v4.1 flash, or MiMo V2.6, and don’t know about cost per task on artificial analysis
We must keep in mind, that even the 500 plan is not cost-covering for many users. Heavy users squeezing everything out of it. It is like the Internet-fees in the end 90s. The flat-rate was not cost-covering by heavy users and I think these plans are only used by heavy users. Maybe we really come to an end of cheap KI and we will use all an mac studio m10 in a few years.
We have to assume that OpenAI knows how to math. Given that the plans all scale usage equally now the benefit of the 500 plan is only for OpenAI. Enough of a percentage of users don't squeeze everything of plans every single month that this profits them more.
If I would pay 500 bucks, I would squeeze as much as I can. Won't you?
That's what I was doing with my Pro 200 plan, except sometimes life gets in the way and I had couple weeks where I couldn't.
OpenAI must have statistics on what percentage of people with Pro accounts don't maximize the usage in a given. Even if it a very small percentage that is still income for providing nothing.
When you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous that the usage credit is use-it-or-lose it. It really should roll over.
https://llmrank.cn/ MiMo-V2.6-Pro US$100/month Qwen3.8 Max (0902) GLM-5.3 (max) Kimi K3 (max) These all very cheap. =_=
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.
We’re getting pretty close to that being the normal process at this point
I know people who have been at this as stage since around 4o with their own custom systems
Me too, I'd say we are about two weeks away
Notifications from both the ChatGPT and Claude app hit my phone when they finish a turn writing code.
> 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.
Got it, calendar updated: switch back to Claude on the 29th.
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel the FTC should start looking at things like this. If a well funded company can bait the market long enough to drown most everyone else out then double their price overnight (ok, 30 days..) doesn't competition just become a matter of who has the deepest pockets?
We used to break up companies (standard oil, american tobacco, both over 100 years ago) for predatory pricing, because it's illegal monopolization. The supreme court raised the standard of proof in '93 (Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson), you have to prove that the defendant sold below cost and that they stand a reasonable chance of recouping those losses, a test which most attempted predatory pricing suits fail these days. So it's pretty much the dominant strategy now- American Airlines got away with it, Walmart got away with it, Amazon got away with it, Uber got away with it many times, and now OpenAI will get away with it.
Are you sure that the FTC is working for our interests lately?
Fair point, I'm quite sure it is the opposite.
Tomorrow's FTC perhaps.
There is going to be such a huge backlog.
Could hire real people in India for this cost - Fresh college under grads are paid like $250 per month or less for a month working 9hours x 5.5 to 6 days.
Edit: I meant its not worth it just for Dots Personal assistant ,also comparing to previous pricing of $200 - For $500 you got previously 5x more than previous $200 Pro pricing (which was 20x now is 10x). I can have real people who can drive or do physical deliveries etc, just on the delta.
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?
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.
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?
and they would be 50x worse
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.
That's still low to support the cost, i think in the next 8m will become 799 or 999
I guess they got tired of people saying Codex plans were a better value than Claude Code.
Tired of their investors saying that
they were! now they are not
Conveniently Opus 5.5 is actually usable vs 5.
But I'm still for investing in local models.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The $20/month subscription is an excellent deal. I wonder what these whales are doing with all those tokens?
I mean, other than Yegge. He seems like a pretty extreme outlier?
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...
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!
At this price points (including the reduction of usage on the Pro 200 and Pro 100 subscriptions), more people will be looking buying their own hardware and running with open weight AIs. $6000 per year is the threshold
It's a bit more complicated than that though. Dollars per token is not the right metric to track.
Local models don't hold a candle to SOTA models unfortunately.
Does it matter when I burn through all my Fable subscription usage in about a day? Astra is much better on efficiency, but doesn’t last a week either. With the new subscription limits, it’ll end up being like Fable.
You should be using Opus 5.5, it's just as good if not better than Fable, and it sips tokens.
Where’s the Pro 200 for business tier?
The highest is Pro 100 and it’s useless for codex.
never did i think SWE would adopt MLM pay-to-play tactics, but here we are in 2026 with companies asking people to pay them $500/mo to rent their brains back to them!
$6k a year on the top monthly rolling subscription vs buying a Mac… There’s an extra 20% of sales tax on that subscription cost in the U.K., but that’s a different matter entirely
Related:
Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889306
Pure scam pricing.
> 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.
actual lol
> New rider trips include a higher base fare than previously offered with Uber to reflect our increasingly efficient trip routing. - Travis K.
Enjoy the Lyft v Uber era while it lasts!
lol yeah, I opened the Uber app the other day to $100 fares, remembered a time when I could get anywhere in SF at any time for like $5.
$5 flat group rides, $8 flat single rides anywhere in the city. The glory days.
Everyone happily paid the way for the behemoth that squeezed everyone out of competition and then started recoup the ROI aggressively, and no one recognizes oneself as a part of the problem, just like in the current AI pandemonium.
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.
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.
It's almost like consumers are just as greedy as the very corps they revile...
Corps don’t act on their own. The same people that work in corps are consumers
When I first learned about Uber ~14 years ago they were offering free rides in my city.
Oh don't worry, you get to keep your higher usage allowance for one month. hahahaha
Given that I burn through 2 x $200 subscriptions, I really hope Sol 6.1 is indeed as good as Astra (￣ー￣；
Yeah, I mean currently a lot of people still prefer using 5.6 Sol over Astra for implementation tasks. If 6.1 hasn't fixed output alignment (vs task completion) this is a huge price increase for those wanting to keep using 5.6 Sol...
So Anthropic releases the best model since sliced bread, and in response OpenAI cuts their usage limits in half after releasing an absolutely atrocious sol-6 version? They seem to have lost the plot entirely.
They probably had this all planned out before Opus 5.5 dropped and are staying the course. Or have something really good up their sleeves.
Is this Astra running on Cerebras?
No this is just the 500$ plan. They offer "ultrafast" now which is ~300tps which is 8x the speed for 6x the price.
I think 300 tps might be roughly what an astra sized model would be at if running on Cerebras hardware no?
Or are they simply lower the batch sizes on whatever hardware they are currently running?
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
I doubt Jalepeno is in production at this scale yet. Cerebras has been touting their datacenter buildout for the past 9 months.
Almost certainly yes. The value prop here is the 8x speed. This is incredibly valuable to many many builders.
Yes that's their new ultrafast tier which is only available on this plan
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.
Sure, then the AI will poke more tokens, more unreadeable code
I'm tired of this.
I've been an OpenAI booster since for a while they've been less user/community hostile and culty than Anthropic, and their models have been competitive and more pleasant/honest to work with while being much more efficient, but between this and the edge Opus 5.5 has I'm switching, sadly.
Holding out for ChatGPT Pro Max Ultra+ Turbo.
DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is good enough for me thanks.
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.
> 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.
You can't, Pro is only available with monthly payment.
No actual mention of the actual 'cutoff date' anywhere to be seen. Was it today? Yesterday? 6 months ago?
It appears that the enshittifaction of this product has begun. Which is honestly most unfortunate it has gone down this route.
Why would I pay $500 now when the $200 features were just rug-pulled? I mean, Pro 1000 is on the horizon at this point, no?
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.
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
Interesting
Great, now they told us what the lowest price will be per month, after their IPO
"We have altered the deal..."
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