Second, the offerings are subject to change at random. They advertised $60 of usage for $10/month (knowing most users wouldn't reach that). This was consistently the case up until early August, when the per-model "usage multipliers" started taking over. Some models give $15 of usage per month, others $30, still others remain at $60, and apparently one at $100 now?[0] Either way, I don't want to expend the mental effort to track which model is the best deal for capability and usage.
Right now I use Hyper[1] for $20/month and give $100/month to OpenAI. Not OpenAI's biggest fan, but the value is good right now, and that's what matters.
I'm now hitting the session limits which means I can either purchase another plan, upgrade, or move off of Codex.
People have a fair chance to learn resource management in 5 hour chunks, while not being limited to silly models, and burning through all tokens in the first hour of the week. Seems mostly good.
What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.
People want things to be better more than they want things to not change. That's a good thing!
I've had few weekends where I spend the full week credits over night then have nothing to do for a week
As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.
Their goal is to create AGI and replace humans with something resembling the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel but more extreme.
When you haven't used any tokens for an extended amount of time it reverts to the point where whenever you send your first token is when the window begins.
I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary
When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.
The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.
That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.
It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options
Having just the weekly limit meant I could blow through too much within the first couple of days. Fortunately, resets were raining down during that time.
(I know I could just vibe code a tracker that splits up my usage into arbitrary periods and lets me know when to take a break. Maybe if they remove the 5-hour limit again.)
A better approach if they want to balance the load is having higher usage or lower usage consumption at different times of day.
The 5h limit hurts the most on the $20 plan because the limit is already very small (5h is ~15% of your weekly).
(I get what you're trying to say, I'm just finding the irony amusing).
Also, who cares? Such is the price of progress, I'm not selfish enough to hold humanity back because "muh job"
Software companies don't give up and fold because they can't hire one of the five best engineers in the world.
Well, as as SWE who writes code by hand and has no intention to outsource their intelligence to any entity, I felt slightly offended by "back".
I wouldn't be surprised if every $10 you add to the subscription cost halves your audience.
For ChatGPT I really only see two customer groups, pro-consumer and small and medium enterprise. The entry level are just going to use Google/Gemini for the most part, or some ad supported ChatGPT tier. There's no price low enough to make the entry level, average consumer pay for an AI service. These are people who will not pay for search, email and social media. They only pay for streaming because there's no way around it.
It's enough to know that the market is competitive and new models with better prices are released often. This means you should have a way to switch models.
I remember the days when I had a $2000+ credit balance on Uber because I mastered their referral program. “Free” uber blacks for 2 years!
When you’re using free shit that you should probably be paying more for, it’s good to not fool yourself.
In the Uber example, the fact that Lyft also existed at the time didn’t matter to me as someone happily riding around the city in Uber Black for $0. Unfortunately Lyft’s referral program wasn’t so lucrative so I couldn’t switch…
I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.
Now, let's see how the Anthropic IPO goes.
I've said this countless times already; if OpenAI or Anthropic were serious about world domination they would offer an infinite $500 to $1000/month tier subscription. No limits; eat as much as you'd like buffet. Maybe limit concurrent connection (say 10 conns max in parallel) to limit abuse. This would actually allow regular users to run 24/7 agentic loops, massively speeding up deployment. Win win for everyone.
Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.
I definitely see the pricing model. I can afford $100, maybe $200, but not $3000.
I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.
On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.
Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.
Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.
Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.
Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.
Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.
I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.
"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?
But yeah, doomerism is the dominant narrative of the day here right now. There's a sort of eschatological poisoning that's happening presently. Nobody can even seem to imagine a world where things get better. It's crazy. Maybe it's because I recently went through a major illness, maybe it's because I hit my head one-to-many times along the way? But I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am now.
That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.
installiskeycon•3h ago