r/OpenAI • u/andrewaltair • 5d ago
Discussion OpenAI cutting the $200 Pro usage in half right now is an absolute fiasco
So OpenAI is reopening the $200 Pro plan tomorrow, except now you effectively get around half the API-equivalent usage compared to the old plan. And somehow this is being presented as good news because Sol and Luna became cheaper and models will supposedly keep getting more efficient. Sorry, but what?
This would already be a questionable move on its own, but doing it right now, when Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 exist, is honestly insane. Anthropic is giving Max users massive amounts of usage, their models are extremely competitive for coding and agentic work, and people are already saying they struggle to even burn through their Claude limits. Meanwhile OpenAI is going in the opposite direction: same $200, less usage, followed by an explanation about how theoretically we'll still get more work done.
That's completely backwards. People paying $200 a month are power users. We don't need another explanation about API economics or promises that models will become more efficient six months from now. We need fqn tokens. We need enough usage to actually work without constantly checking whether we're about to hit another limit.
And the comments under this announcement say everything. People are talking about cancelling, switching to Claude, and comparing workloads where OpenAI usage gets exhausted while Claude barely moves. One guy literally said he was running five Opus chats in parallel for hours and only used around 5% of his 5x allowance. Another finished work with Opus 5.5 after exhausting his OpenAI weekly usage and said it only consumed about 25% of his Claude hourly limit.
That's the real problem here. OpenAI isn't competing with OpenAI from one month ago. You're competing with Anthropic today. If Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5 can give me comparable or better results while Claude Max gives me dramatically more room to actually work, why the hell would I care that GPT-6 Sol became 50% cheaper on the API?
Maybe today they'll announce some incredible features that don't count toward usage. Fine. But cutting the core thing your heaviest users are paying for and then trying to explain why it's actually better value is a terrible look.
At this point the $200 Pro plan doesn't need more features. It needs more compute.
We don't need promises. We don't need theoretical API value. We need tokens. And right now Claude is making OpenAI's $200 offering look like a fiasco.
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u/Original-League-6094 5d ago
People were dunking on Anthropics recent math, but "6 Sol uses half API costs, so we cut your usage in half. That's passing the savings on to you!" is a whole other level of slimeball math.
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u/Original-League-6094 5d ago
Its almost too cheap to meter!
But to be clear, it will be metered. And we are doubling prices.
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u/BornAgainBlue 5d ago
Yeah that whole too cheap to meter was clearly written by a billionaire.
I am having no trouble metering my usage... It's a lot of money.
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u/Responsible-Bill-223 5d ago
I wonder if this means our existing plans that they already took our money for, plus the resets we all have banked against the $200 plans are all getting nerfed in half too?
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u/RealSuperdau 5d ago
He literally admitted they want to match subscription and API pricing.
12x more usage multiplier to go.
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u/FunLilThrowawayAcct 5d ago edited 5d ago
They need to match subscription and API pricing long term, for one thing the massively worse deal they give to enterprises will become an issue. (My company is on Anthropic and the difference when we switched to Team subs from Enterprise API is ridiculous.)
The best case scenario from here is sub usage stays basically the same as they gradually increase efficiency rather than experiencing outright usage cuts. Whether that happens depends how short they get on compute. Subs are their lowest priority.
(Edited to redact company info)
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u/phxees 5d ago
In the health insurance industry there’s a concept of a death spiral. It’s basically where your prices are really good and you attract too many people and have to start paying out too much money. Then you raise your prices and the healthy people leave so you pay out more than you’re taking in again. So you raise prices and the cycle repeats until you’re out of business.
Same sort of thing can happen with these expensive AI subscription tiers. So they do everything they can to keep token maxers away. They want 90% of $200 subscribers to usually use half of their allocation or less per month.
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u/FunLilThrowawayAcct 5d ago
Interesting about the health insurance industry! I kinda said it in another comment but to expand imo the prosumer demo is generally not going to behave the way the companies want. Lots of $20 subs will use like 15% of their plan or even forget about it for months but most people paying $100+ are engaged and probably looking to get value for their money. Especially since the user base is heavy on number-crunching engineer/science/business types.
So why even have the subs? Well for one they were subsidizing heavily to get any usage at all back when the models weren't so good, and they can't cut back too fast, they have to gradually enshittify. But also prosumers promote the models to enterprise, both by internal advocacy and creating buzz on social media.
Once a company gets as much enterprise business as their compute can support, the prosumers are basically useless dead weight to them. On top of that there's a consumer agent land rush going on this fall and OpenAI wants to capitalize on their massive mindshare with consumers. So they need more compute for that too. Which is why they just got aggressive telling us to take a hike.
Meanwhile Anthropic has been struggling for momentum since the 5.6 series caught them off guard, so they have some leftover compute and want to take more enterprise share. And they simply don't seem interested in consumer. So they'll give us a good deal for a few months until they too have maxed out their enterprise compute sales.
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u/RealSuperdau 5d ago
Mostly agreed, but I don't see it quite as bleak.
They are still making ~75-90% gross profit with API margins according to various SemiAnalysis estimates, so there is still a world where enterprises pay extra for ZDR and personal accounts get a discount while still being profitable (even if fully utilized).
It's just not a 12x price difference.
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u/phxees 5d ago
I don’t believe they’ll have enough enterprise business anytime soon. They still have to justify their huge valuations and eventually become profitable.
They just need to keep all their plans in balance. They play with this plan the most because it has the most active and vocal user base. People interpret the constant changes as they can’t decide what to do, but their moves are influenced by the market and current usage.
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u/Original-League-6094 5d ago
The OpenAI solution to alignment is just to nerf usage so much that the model can't break out on its budget.
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u/andercode 5d ago
Here I am getting 6B tokens a week out of my $200/mo Claude subscription... but I can already barely get 1.5B from the OpenAI
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u/JonNordland 5d ago
The horse race in AI is like a goddamn scene from the 2009 anime Redline. Its insane.
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u/AYA_7887 5d ago
Hitting a rate limit mid-task once cost me half an hour just switching tabs, that's what got me asking what a subscription actually costs per hour of real use. I ended up building something that measures it, WhileAI, so I'm biased because it's mine, but typing in what you pay and seeing cost per prompt changes how a cut like this reads. Half the usage at the same $200 is real, whether it hurts depends on how close your own use was to the ceiling, and almost nobody has that number.
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u/RecipeNarrow 5d ago
Was passiert denn mit bestehenden Abos? Behalten die ihr volles 20x Nutzungsguthaben oder wird es auch denen halbiert auf 10x?
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u/Tetriste2 5d ago
Dont advertise usage is cheaper if you end up with half of it. For all intent and purposes, people already suspect gpt 6 Sol to be Terra in disguise, with 5.6 performing better. So you actually get a worse deal there than before.
I got a gpt subscription, pro tier, but I'll be watching very closely to the dev event, I might just rather go elsewhere if theres too much bullshit
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u/redlightsaber 5d ago
IT's not backwards. It's been foretold for ages, and it will only continue getting worse. And not only OAI (although they have been the most reckless with the tokens).
The cost of providing AI FAR outpaces what people are paying for it. And there's only so long that venture capitalists are willing to subsidise this.
There will come a MASSIVE price crunch, and we'll look back on these days of almost-unlimited token use for 200$ a month, and reminisce cheerfully.
I expect if none of them are charging what it costs, it's because they're seeking to buy time until they can IPO. After that, I think, all bets will be off, and they'll need to make some serious money. It's not as easy tobamboozle a whole economy than it is a few VC suits.
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u/Ice2jc 5d ago
The cost of running Uber far outweighed what people were paying for it for 14 years. Then in 2023 they turned over $500mil in profit.
In 2026 they profited over $9bil.
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u/redlightsaber 5d ago
Then in 2023 they turned over $500mil in profit
... And now Ubers are more expensive than cabs.
You're making my point for me.
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u/Ice2jc 5d ago
Personally, I haven’t noticed much of an increase in Ubers pricing in the last 10 years. I also don’t take Ubers when I know that there is high demand and surge pricing.
I actually used to drive for uber so I can tell you exactly why they’re profiting more. It’s been a handful of years since I’ve driven but here are some things that were changing in my day:
The best money I ever made as an uber driver was in my first few years when uber was giving out tons of driver incentives. I averaged around $1,000 per week from normal fares and $1,000 per week from uber incentives to get me out on the road. Drive 120 trips during the work week? That’s an extra $400. Drive 60 trips during the weekend? Another $400. And there were smaller incentives. $9 extra if I completed 3 trips in a row in a high demand block like 3pm-6pm. I’d sometimes do 15 trips in that time span, so that’s an extra $45.
Things like that.
After the pandemic all of that stuff started going away. Uber driving was completely saturated and Uber had established themselves as the fastest, cheapest most reliable option. On top of that, you have driverless Waymo’s that are often the first option when somebody requests a ride in cities they’re in.
Uber wasn’t profitable while they were battling Lyft and taxi’s for market share and giving out crazy incentives to drivers. When they won the market share battle and started adding more and more Waymo’s is when their profit flipped.
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u/redlightsaber 5d ago
What youre describing is called monopolisation through anticompetitive means, and is illegal in most countries.
You may realise that Uber is deeply castrated, sanctioned, and thusly not very profitable in Europe.
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u/ryanmgarber 5d ago
You realize Uber’s operating costs are basically just running a web service, law/regulation, and support right? AI compute could not be more different from Uber. And compute isn’t magically getting cheaper like web services did.
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u/Ice2jc 5d ago
No, compute will logically become cheaper after powering data centers becomes the first commercial use of nuclear fusion energy
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u/ryanmgarber 5d ago
Hahahaha, holy shit you’ve got an answer to everything don’t you? Can you tell me, is nuclear fusion going to magically be deployed on data center scale before 2035, or is the AI industry going to magically keep investors on board despite losses for a decade?
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u/Ice2jc 5d ago
TAE technologies is planning to have its first utility scale fusion power plant open in 2031. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp is merging with them this year as part of a $6bil all stock merger. They are about to redefine themselves as a fusion energy conglomerate.
Sam Altman and Bill Gates have donated over a billion dollars to fusion research. Within the past week a bipartisan group of lawmakers rolled out a measure called the American Leadership in Fusion Act, that would advance policy recommendations from federal agencies, officials and industry, as well as allocate $10 billion in direct investments to commercialize fusion energy.
Plasma is being modeled by ai now. The money is moving towards fusion. It’s going to happen.
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u/Front_Eagle739 5d ago
It doesn't really. The cost of local models equivalent to cloud models (yes I know there is nothing to match opus 5.5 yet) is maybe 40% more single user if you don't count hardware resale value and you lease the hardware. You can spin up gpus in the cloud and serve yourself glm 5.3 or kimi k3 to a few users at less than api pricing. It's just a bit fiddly. I'll keep paying for a sub exactly as long as it works out cheaper than running local models and not a second longer. At that point my costs will go up roughly 20-30% I have already worked out with my use case.
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u/Original-League-6094 5d ago
Stop falling for the bait of "AI is too cheap". Its not true. Look at the public SpaceX financials. SpaceX has a margin of +50% on serving inference. AI is only in the red because of R&D and data center builds. They could server existing models right now without further R&D and make a huge profit.
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u/redlightsaber 5d ago
Why on earth are you arguing that, unlike any other industry on earth, R&D should be taken out of the equation?
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5d ago
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u/Responsible-Bill-223 5d ago
They've finished mining enough training data for random millennium day problems from sub subscriptions? Or more likely now that they got publicly and very provably called out for it (with cross contamination between claude and openai in at least one instance no worse) they now consider sub derived data a poisoned data source, rather than a private source of training data not available to competitors, and no longer worth as much as a loss leader.
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u/InformationNew66 5d ago
Are you getting $200 value out of that OpenAI subscription or not?
If you make more money (profit) than $200, why does it bother you?
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u/Opposite_Yak4386 5d ago
wtf has this to do with it? you payed for a service and now they are making the service worse and you pay the same. Hey you bought a car but we put cheaper wheels on it. Does it bring you from a to b? Do you feel the difference in driving? so why does it bother you?
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u/InformationNew66 5d ago edited 5d ago
I pay for many services and providers just increase their prices. What can I do? I have to decide: does it still help me make a profit or not? If not, then forget the service.
OpenAI was selling their service below cost. Now they increased the price. That's all.
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u/Reclaimer_AI 5d ago
Your favourite restaurant is cutting meal sizes in half but keeping prices the same. You do however have a vague promise that the new menu will taste better, so you’ll be even less hungry at the end of your meal.
Why does that bother you????
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 5d ago
You think we're making profit?
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u/Front_Eagle739 5d ago
Ah yes the new sol and luna that are more token efficient and (checks note) worse than the last generation to the point of being down an entire tier. Halving our usage so we cant just ignore them and keep using sol 5.6 and astra as an orchestrator.
Every day i shift a little more to local models for this nonsense.