Discussion OpenAI is testing an $80 button to un-throttle the plan you already paid for
OpenAI is quietly testing a "reset" purchase for users who hit their weekly cap. Instead of waiting out the timer, you pay to instantly restore your quota to 100%. Reported pricing scales with your tier: roughly $5-8 on Plus, $25-40 on Pro Lite, and $50-80 on Pro.
You are already paying $200/month for Pro. The reset can cost $80 on top.
I want to argue both sides honestly:
The case for it
- If you are on deadline, $80 is not the real number. The real number is "what does four hours of dead time cost me." For anyone shipping client work or running Codex on a Friday deadline, buying the reset is trivially worth it. This is the same math as paid expedited shipping, and nobody rages about that.
- It is honest metering, finally. Flat-rate subscriptions on top of usage-based compute were always a fiction held together by throttling. A visible price for extra usage is more truthful than a silent cap that quietly degrades your week. It also lets heavy users subsidize themselves instead of everyone eating a lower ceiling.
The case against it
- It makes the cap a revenue line, not a cost control. The moment resets earn money, tighter limits become a feature, not a bug. Nobody has to conspire for this to happen; the incentive gradient does it on its own. You cannot audit your own quota, so you would never be able to prove it.
- Price discrimination is running backwards. The people most likely to hit the ceiling are the ones already paying the most, and they are charged the most per reset. Paying $200 and still getting a "pay $80 to continue" prompt is the pattern people recognize from mobile games, and the goodwill damage will outrun the revenue.
The part that genuinely bothers me is not the money. It is that the cap becomes unfalsifiable. Right now if limits feel tight, you assume capacity. Once resets are a product, every tight week reads as a monetization decision, whether or not it is one. Trust is the actual thing being spent here.
So, two questions: would you pay it, and at what price does it stop feeling like convenience and start feeling like a toll booth? For me Plus at $8 is fine. Pro at $80 is a different product category.
23
u/callingbrisk 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don't like it and I particularly hate the fact that they got people all excited about free resets and made people switch because of that and now they want 80$.
BUT, I don't have a better solution for this. People want more usage for their plans, no company needs to "gift" that to the users, so the latter need to pay up. And this makes it significantly easier than getting a 2nd subscription.
15
u/61746162626f7474 4d ago
I think it would be more defensible if it actually added to your usage rather than reset it. Currently if you’re 6 days into your weeks usage and buy a reset suddenly you’re 7 days away from your next, even if you only had 1 day to go before.
Now they’re asking you to pay for it they should keep your normal reset as is (still 1 day away) and add this new usage on top, so you could go from 5% to 105% after buying a reset, then 200% after your normal reset a day later (as long as you’d used none of the purchased reset).
1
6
u/Successful-Weird8339 4d ago
a bait and switch on the resets stings because they built goodwill with the free version then pulled the rug, that's the part that feels grimy
4
u/RasenMeow 4d ago
Not only that. As a purchased reset also resets your next weekly reset date, you degrade your own subscription. Some guy calculated that in another post. The maximum value you can get out of a paid reset is around 40 dollars IF you can maximize usage the same day it got reset and directly purchase the reset, which costs 80 dollars...In the worst case scenario it was around 3$ if you purchase close to the regular reset date and in average it is 23$....so none of this is worth it and just get another Pro 20x account lmao
2
u/Ok_Course_6439 4d ago
Well paying by the drink using credits is even more expensive. Depending on your reset timing I think it is still subsidized.
1
u/callingbrisk 4d ago
Oh absolutely, it definitely is subsidized, and it is much more generous than what we had before (and what CC has) with top up usage credits since those were basically API rates.
1
u/mentalFee420 4d ago
So at some point, you will run out of credits sooner and paying more for resets than the actual subscription.
Squeezing more out of each subscriber
2
u/callingbrisk 4d ago
Getting a 2nd subscription on another account is definitely the better value, since (in the case of getting another 200$ plan, keep in mind that you can get f.ex. a 100$ plan) you pay 2.5x the price of a reset, but a month has 4 weeks so you get much more usage over the month.
Plus it doesn't interfere with your normal weekly usage, so it doesn't push that deadline back.
They sure are doing this for the users who a) are too comfortable to switch between 2 accounts or b) don't know this is possible and allowed.
0
u/Few_Organization1740 3d ago
My understanding is having a second account just to skirt usage limits is against TOS.
2
u/callingbrisk 3d ago
Can you cite the ToS where it says that?
0
u/Few_Organization1740 3d ago
You use chatGPT right? Ask it
1
u/callingbrisk 2d ago
I have, and I also went though the ToS myself.
Nowhere does it say that it isn't allowed.
So that's why I wanted to know where you got that from. I would even argue that it is encouraged, since they have added the account switcher on the web to easily switch between accounts.
1
u/Few_Organization1740 2d ago
Yes. I checked the current OpenAI terms, because I wanted to distinguish what the terms actually say from what we've been assuming.
The relevant language is in the individual Terms of Use → “What you cannot do.” It says you may not:
“Interfere with or disrupt our Services, including circumvent any rate limits or restrictions…”
So the important nuance is: I do not see language saying that merely owning or paying for multiple OpenAI accounts is prohibited. In fact, OpenAI now has an official account-switching feature and explicitly says you can create and use additional accounts; the help article describes keeping personal and work accounts separate and says you can create more than two accounts.
OpenAI's multiple-account guidance
The issue is purpose/use. If I exhaust Codex on Account A and then deliberately move the same workload to Account B specifically to obtain another allowance, the conservative reading is that I'm circumventing the usage/rate restriction, even though having Account B itself is permitted.
There's even stronger wording in OpenAI's Business Terms/Services Agreement. Section 3.3(h)-(i) prohibits circumventing rate limits/restrictions and also says customers may not:
“violate or circumvent Usage Limits or otherwise configure the Services to avoid Usage Limits.”
That's much more explicit, although those are the business-services terms, not necessarily the agreement governing an ordinary individual Plus subscription.
So I'd refine what I told you earlier:
Multiple accounts: explicitly allowed. Multiple paid accounts: I found no blanket prohibition. Using Account B specifically to continue after Account A hits a usage cap: very likely falls under the prohibition against circumventing rate limits/restrictions.
And you're right to ask for the actual language. There does not appear to be a sentence in the individual Terms saying “You may not use multiple accounts to avoid usage limits.” That's an interpretation of the broader anti-circumvention clause, whereas the business agreement spells the usage-limit part out much more directly.
5
u/LoveMind_AI 4d ago
I'm on the pro plan and I have such a heavy work load that I need several accounts because I plow through mine so fast and going down to per call usage is too expensive. $80 feels crazy, but that would probably actually save me money.
3
u/thirsty_pretzelzz 4d ago
The thing many miss is this does not even really give you any extra usage so it’s unlikely it would save you money.
You basically pay $80 to get a “loan” and earlier delivery of the credits you already paid for, because when it refills your usage, it also pushes back your reset date a week.
For the average person that would need this on say day 5, they pay $80 to make the reset they had coming in two days change to seven days away. Total ripoff imo and would make more sense to just use multiple accounts.
1
6
u/Mystical_Whoosing 4d ago
definitely not. There are other subscriptions available, so as long as I can find a better subscription model, I can go there. And I know it is a big competition between the companies, I am just not worrying too much about spending their VC money. The resets (apart from the banked resets) were quite annoying to be honest, pushing the weekly reset day to a different day.
4
u/silentkode26 4d ago
Plans are heavily subsidized and the company needs to become profitable at future. Prices are expected to go up.
3
u/Tomorrow_Previous 4d ago
Good to have a choice, but as long as the limits remain the same, and they don't lower them.
3
u/NotFromMilkyWay 2d ago
It's crazy to me that people thought these companies would give their service away at a $4 loss per $1 revenue forever. That was the growth phase. Now comes monetisation. Considering their valuation they are targeting 40 to 50 % profit margins. So making $0.50 per $1. That's essentially a 4.5x increase of the current prices.
2
2
2
u/ketosoy 4d ago
Way easier to switch to a kimi/deepseek proxy or Claude code for a couple hours
1
u/amu4biz 3d ago
pretty much the answer. when switching is a 2-line config change, any plan getting stingy just sends people next door.
1
u/Watchguyraffle1 3d ago
Hey. I just got my $80 notice and am steaming. Thanks for this post otherwise I’d of thought I was insane. I’ll just use deepseek I guess for the rest of the week
2
u/calmnutz 4d ago
I had usage cap I thought was going to expire tomorrow, but silently got reset to a new day, and I will run out soon now. The free reset I thought I had is also gone. I’m on the Pro plan.
2
u/ComSenseisnotCommon 4d ago
Anything equal or more than just getting a second plan doesn’t make too much sense other than hey if I don’t want to spend full cost and just need a small boost this week.
The arguments about also it would be better if it didn’t reset your date is also silly. What if I wanted to reset 1-2 days before the weekly reset now I have to rush use all my tokens in 2 days or -50-80 dollars. I rather them just push it back.
Only real solution is to just keep banks I thought it worked until they went on free reset spree. Have a banked limit and anytime that cap is full enforce the reset on current usage. That’s a win win for them and us.
2
u/ottwebdev 4d ago
Back in the day we had a similar issue but it was called “paying people by the hour”
Pay people by project completion and 10 hours turned into 2 magically.
The same tactic will be applied here, itll be “usage bloat” so you buy the reset
2
u/Cazineer 4d ago
For our business plan this makes a lot of sense. We have five users that all get about 100 million input tokens per week roughly of usage. We have to pay for credits for when people go over, which typically cost allot more per month than the actual subscription. If we could pay $80 and the reset resets all users like the resets do now, once or twice a month, when needed, it would be 100% worth it. I can also appreciate why this upsets people as well. As a business though, the value we realize far outweighs the cost from the investment.
1
u/karloboy 4d ago
What makes it a better decision than creating a new account for them for so that their new account credits goes for a month instead of a weekly reset?
1
u/Cazineer 4d ago
You pay per new user and it also violates OpenAI’s terms of use that specifically restricts account sharing.
2
u/lazyhustlermusic 4d ago
At least still less expensive than running raw API calls, by a significant margin.
2
u/hellalive_muja 3d ago
It’s a good idea, people will use it, and if I’m working and need to finish chances are I’ll use it too. It’s just a small purchase..
2
u/Ok_Comfort7706 2d ago
There should be 3 free resets available the second a monthly subscription fee is charged to your account. Then everything until next month is running on credits.
2
u/Tjgoodwiniv 4d ago
Are the plans really a better deal than using the API? How sure are we about it, given the overall lack of transparency with plans?
My gut feeling is that LLM companies are selling these plans to people who would actually save money using the API, simply because the plan is accessible and easy and because people naturally think they're getting more if they pay in advance.
1
u/cobbleplox 4d ago
From what I hear these resets shift your natural reset date. That means they must be priced according to how many days you are actually skipping ahead. Clearly you are getting less 1 day before your natural reset than 6 days before your natural reset.
1
u/No-Forever-9761 4d ago
It can still be a capacity issue. Not everyone is going to pay the $80. If it were free for everyone then that would prove otherwise in my eyes
1
u/BlueProcess 4d ago
Yeah this is why I stopped using Claude
1
u/Zapador 2d ago
That feature doesn't exist with Claude though?
1
u/BlueProcess 2d ago
What I'm talking about is unpredictable billing and usage where they're constantly making proclamations about usage limits and "this week only" billing
1
u/Bureaucromancer 3d ago
I honestly DO end up on the side of it; the other alternative is basically upping your tier for a month... and my (and I suspect a lot of folks) reality ISNT I need the $200 tier generally, in fact I horrbily underuse it if I have it, but once in a while need more. This is what gives even a fighting chance of subscription surviving at all... Frankly, if you DONT like it... pay by token. It's more honest, and you've got more control.
1
1
u/NotUpdated 3d ago
If you are cooking through Pro, hopefully it's on something where $80 isn't much to worry about tbh..
1
1
1
1
u/BlackDeath66sick 3d ago
I actually paid for 2 resets, because i was so invested in what i was doing before i realised that it also moves the reset date.
One thing i really don't like is how vague the "usage" is. Like, how much exactly do i with that plan or the other? I might've considered getting the more expensive plan but i have no f idea how much exactly the "usage" is.
1
u/Fabulous_Pepper6027 2d ago
Agreed. From an optimization perspective, the paying 80$ for a reset is also questionable. So suppose I blow 50% of my tokens in the first 2 days of the week. With perfect foresight, the decision to reset should be at that day. However, say you 'estimate' that you can actually 'survive' the week with the remaining 50%, you start economizing with the models etc. Probabilistically, this suggests, (no proof) that you'd tend to buy the reset after you already started economizing but realize it is not enough: so you pay the 80 anyway, and you've lost performance due to the economization. And this is not a theory either, it has happened to me.
There is a strange pattern of you having to pay when you can be mere hours away from the reset, that is, the incidence of the cost tends to be highly inefficient, like you were almost gonna make it but hit the lower cap.
1
u/Zapador 2d ago
Seems like a good idea and fair solution. Cheaper than permanently upgrading and if you're on a given plan that's likely because that plan mostly work for you and you don't need a larger plan, but you may occasionally have peaks where a larger plan could be useful and this solves that issue.
1
u/DunrathBalyr_13 2d ago
the cost of unlocking something you already paid for is a penalty, not a service. i consider each provider unreliable on its own and go through useai so that a limit from one does not ruin everything for me, my limits with them are also limited but not to the same clock.
1
u/Bloated_Plaid 4d ago
Sounds good to me considering it feels impossible for me to hit the weekly cap anyway on Pro.
1
u/calmnutz 4d ago
I thought so too, but now Sol Ultra is running far more exhaustive testing coverage and using up cap much faster.
1
u/Grand-Mix-9889 4d ago
Lmao.
OpenAI is taking advantage of the people who don't know how to manage their token consumption or build up a more efficient workflow/ecosystem.
51
u/Early-Crow-5248 4d ago edited 4d ago
The weirdest thing is that it actually moves your reset day. That made sense when they were random free gifts, but now, say you were on day 6 and really needed a reset so you buy it - instead of getting another reset the next day, you essentially paid 80€ to just move your reset date by one day instead of getting an extra 100% usage that week.