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.
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.
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…
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.
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…”
I've talked to VP at my company and we both agreed $1000 for the time saved, is still 'worth it'.
Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.
I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.
I'd rather use the fancy models while absurd valuations are subsidising them and then pick up a couple grand worth of their old hardware in a few years when they're eol.
Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.
How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.
On what tokens? The ones of today's model, or tomorrow's?
The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.
Are you serious? If you used 10$ of your subscription until 10th of month and then prices changed, well, the rest of your subscription uses new prices, that's basic math.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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, 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.
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.
$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
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
The idea is you'll always be paying that price, they'll just shrinkflate what you get and not tell you by how much. This has already been happening, now they're being a little more explicit about it.
At this rate I expect end-to-end work getting done, no babysitting whatsoever. The agents should literally be calling me and talking about their problem if something needs my input.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math
Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.
Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:
Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.
I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.
Gets to put you under pressure to deliver more while paying you less. A few months you say, why not weeks? I'm sure the latest model can do it.
Also, forget about those "easy" ideas, if you are not on the verge of burnout every day you might as well not be working.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just trust me bro accounting.
Previous $200 tier: 20x pro value
New $200 tier: 10x
New $500 tier: 25x, plus ultrafast mode but it drains 6x the cost (!!)
The $200 cut to 10x was announced only formally on Twitter
However none of their product pages mention concrete #s, so I guess value will only degrade more over time.
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 $500 for the sole benefit of using ultrafast (depleted probably within hours).
Or it's saying it's always on fast mode therefore it's like running a 20x on fast all the time?
Super confused.
500$ is a old 200$ plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast?
What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.
Yes.
> What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.
If you have unlimited money, it lets you give it to OpenAI to get faster results, presumably because you don't have unlimited time.
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.
actual lol
Enjoy the Lyft v Uber era while it lasts!
It's getting shitty, I agree, but still feels like a net improvement to where we were over a decade ago.
But I'm still for investing in local models.
I'll cancel my OpenAI plan after this billing cycle. Let's see how this plays out.
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)
https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/chinese-flash-models-a...
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.
So expect further downgrades in the plan features for the same price.
It looks like they have literally chosen the most straightforward sounding plan names they could think of.
This is just the beginning. Migrate to open models ASAP.
I know people who have been at this as stage since around 4o with their own custom systems
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?
OpenAI announced they built clones of apps that already exist, codex for normal people, and 2.5x price increase for the product that is already getting decimated by competition.
What is happening at OpenAI?
I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.
Same here, but I’m worried it’s the latter. We’ll probably see an Anthropic price hike in a couple of weeks.
If ANT does the price hike, OAI will be forced to backtrack because they're just not equal, OAI is behind. ANT would still be a much better value overall, and people will remember that it was OAI that made their ANT subscription more expensive. So the hiatus will happen. There's a lot of users that have $200 plans on both ANT and OAI. $500 leaves the slot for just 1 sub for them.
But I think the price hike is not going to happen. $500 is much, much harder to justify than $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.
Had both a anthropic and openai then switched to 2 openai for astra. They want to capture the straddlers between both.
But this is a horrible decision. They could have eased customers into this instead of massive change. The are literally more than doubling the cost for no value add.
A smart company would have done this when they released astra or only allowed astra on 500$ plan. Or made it more sutble. I would likely have ate a 20% increase but this is over double.
I mean, other than Yegge. He seems like a pretty extreme outlier?
Subscription pricing will eventually compete with labor costs
> 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.
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.
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.
Or are they simply lower the batch sizes on whatever hardware they are currently running?
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.
The performance changes between models are almost static. Recently, GPT has shifted almost entirely toward token efficiency.
Astra is good at making 3D assets, but realistically its coding was not as good as GPT 5.6 Sol.
Have we reached a point where getting better at one thing means starting to get worse at another?
This announcement is the worst one yet.
Nerfing existing usage A more expensive top-tier plan Showing off how slow Dots is right in the demo video And GPT Space—are they telling us to use it instead of Notion or what...
Overall, throughout the entire announcement, everything OpenAI wants me to look forward to just leaves me, as a developer, disappointed.
I 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.
Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889306
Fuck that shit!