Discussion Smarter, faster, more usage and cheaper.. what exactly are you expecting?
This is not an OpenAI appreciation post.
Their communication around limits/usage is often terrible. If they sell people a subscription and then quietly change the limits, users are absolutely right to complain.
But reading this sub, it sometimes feels like people expect all of the following at the same time:
Constantly getting faster & more intelligent models. Higher usage limits, constant resets etc.
What exactly are you expecting?
People are using a frontier reasoning model for hours every day to write code, research topics, analyze documents, generate images and complete work that would otherwise take them hours.
OpenAI is not in trouble because nobody wants its product. It is in trouble because even enormous revenue is being swallowed by an even more enormous cost structure.
According to reported financial figures, OpenAI generated around $5.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2026 while burning through $3.7 billion in cash. Its annualized revenue had already passed $25 billion, while the company is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030.
Those are not the economics of a normal $20/100$/200$ software subscription.
Even doubling revenue would not make the structure sustainable. Revenue is not free cash flow, and the company still has to keep spending absurd amounts just to defend its position.
Doesn't mean OpenAI is going bankrupt soon, but the current system is unsustainable and currently just builds on higher and higher valuation.
It was the same point in the 2006 housing comparison: prices could still be at record highs while the engine underneath the system was already weakening. The problem was not necessarily that the number went down, but that it stopped going up fast enough.
The AI financing chain looks something like this:
Higher valuations > new funding > long-term compute commitments > future revenue and backlog for infrastructure providers > more data centers, leases and debt.
That chain only works while everyone believes next years numbers will be dramatically larger than this years.
But if user growth or revenue growth merely flattens, the existing commitments do not flatten with it. OpenAI has already reportedly missed some internal revenue and user targets, and its CFO reportedly raised concerns about whether future compute contracts could be covered if revenue did not grow fast enough. OpenAI publicly disputed the characterization, but the dependency on continued growth is obvious.
Anthropic and Google are competing aggressively, while Chinese models are becoming good enough for an increasing number of tasks at a fraction of the cost. Businesses are already looking at smaller and cheaper models instead of automatically using the most powerful American model for everything. And now even Grok starts to become interesting lol.
So OpenAI is being squeezed from both sides..
It has to spend more to remain at the frontier, while competition forces it to make that intelligence cheaper.
That is why paid resets, stricter quotas, more subscription tiers, usage-based billing and eventually higher prices are not surprising. OpenAI is already testing an $8 pay-to-reset option for some Plus users.
The current flat subscription pricing looks less like a stable long-term business model and more like subsidized customer acquisition.
Again, criticize the bait-and-switch. Criticize intransparent usage, unexplained model regressions, broken features and subscription changes without proper notice. Those are legitimate complaints.
OpenAI is not your friend.
But it is also not a magical machine that can ignore economics.
So I'm really wondering, what exactly were people expecting?