One of their three identical accounts had ~20% lower limits and the explanation was an "extremely tiny" A/B test. Makes the "5x" kind of a joke. I'd honestly take a slightly worse plan if it just published the actual token limits.

Let's hope they don't nerf Opus 5.5

Submarine ?

> subscription gross margins are way lower than API and meaningfully reduce revenue per MW for both OpenAI and Anthropic

I don't know about everyone else, but there is no way in hell I would pay even $200 for API-priced tokens for personal use. So at least for my sample size of one, Anthropic's revenue would not be higher if they dropped their subscription plan (they would get $0 from me instead of $200 per month).

This says “Anthropic gives you 5× more API-priced model usage”, which is not equivalent to “Anthropic is 5x as much value”. This does not take into account model/harness efficiency. I tried looking up some benchmarks and Claude seemingly uses roughly 5x as many tokens while taking its sweet time to complete a task. No such thing as a coincidence.

but ai credit runs out really really fast

My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”.

I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications.

If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use.

Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in.

Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision.

But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget.

I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway.

My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.

What’s news to me is that Anthropic reports that it has 88% gross margin. I find that extremely hard to believe with the capex required to build and run the models.

This is a joke.

> Token efficiency is also an extremely relevant factor, but the industry unfortunately lacks reliable data here. Many people like to cite this chart from Artificial Analysis, but we do not believe the benchmark tasks in the AA Intelligence Index are at all representative of real work people do with LLMs.

Right, so they just ignore the fact that different models use very different number of tokens to achieve the same thing. Ignoring that means they can't say anything about "value". This is like comparing numbers with different units. They're Atokens and Otokens.

My chatgpt pro account gave me 62k of their "credits" which they try to sell you at extortionate rates when your subscription runs out. I spent two days hammering it and used about 4k of those.

This is clear manipulation to prevent me from complaining about lower limits until it's out of the news cycle, but I don't care. As soon as those are gone, if my $200 account doesn't give me the value it used to, I'm out.

The random resets are also clear manipulation in this regard as well. Rather than just give me a fixed weekly limit which I could then get a sense of and know if it's getting reduced, they throw out a ~0-3 resets a week at random, unexpected intervals so that I'll never know.

if anyone wants a lifehack just get $100 sub from anthropic, get $80 sub from z.ai, download omp.sh, set task/advisor to glm 5.3 flash with max thinking, default opus 5.5 with medium thinking, slow set to xhigh thinking and design set to xhigh/max - max will produce significantly more complete designs.

day2day performance difference is negligible, there's less refusals and you always have glm 5.3 for whenever opus 5.5 arbitrarily decides to terminate your conversation.

This is enough to run 2 concurrent sessions 16 hours a day.

The title is misleading: by token count, it’s only 3× more valuable.

And there’s also a major error in the calculation: it doesn’t account for the “generous” resets that are mentioned at the beginning of the article!

Taking the 1 to 2 weekly resets into account and comparing tokens, the ChatGPT Pro 200 plan works out to be between 1.2× and 1.7× more cost-effective per token than Claude’s for Astra/Fable, while for Sol/Opus it’s more like 0.7× to 1.04× as valuable.

However, this also doesn’t take into account the fact that, as another commenter pointed out, GPT-6.1 Sol currently uses fewer tokens to perform the same task (according to that comment, 5× fewer tokens, but I haven’t verified those numbers).

My figures are very rough, but the conclusion in the title is clearly false and clickbait. I get the impression that OpenAI offers better value for now, even if that means we’re relying on those “generous” resets continuing to happen.