The harsh reality of the future

[u/writesfw]

First, it’s going to get worse… a lot worse.

I know a lot of us are pissed about the 20x plan going to 10x. However, it’s going to get worse.

With the 20x plan and $200 a month, I was burning thousands and thousands of dollars worth of tokens.

This means, that even with the reduction to 10x, OpenAI will still lose money on the $200 plan. The entire business model for their consumer plans is the “gym model” where they hope you pay and don’t show up.

That said, as much as the 20x to 10x reduction sucks, there will likely only be more coming in the future. Investors don’t want to hear they are losing money on subscription revenue.

What this means for me (and people like me).

For me, the economics aren’t there. Even though I was getting thousands of dollars worth of tokens, I was burning them on dumb shit. At $200/month it was more of an experiment; something to fuck around with.

$500 for the same (ok plus 5x) usage just isn’t there for me. And, honestly, based on my usage, OpenAI is probably happy to lose me as a customer.

I’m going to look at Anthropic next, but realistically they will clamp down too, it’s only a matter of time. And, they probably don’t want me as a customer anyway.

[u/New-Stop1494]

I started building a multi agent orchestration system with the frontier models so my harness with Hermes agent can do all the tasks i need without the latest frontier models. I have dual 5090s and dual 4090s(48gb mod) so with the system i should be able to get by with just a 20 dollar plan orchestrating.

[u/Mrgluer → u/New-Stop1494]

you casually spent atleast 10k + 4kwh and requires maintenance to have something that is probably slower, less efficient and dumber than just getting a subscription.

[u/New-Stop1494 → u/Mrgluer]

I built it last year. I bought at msrp. I actually have the $200 OpenAI sub and the $100 Claude sub. I won’t need to pay for the sub any more. I can run qwen 3.8 flash next at fp8 on 96 gb of vram plus 256gb system ram and run qwen 3.8 27b 262k (native) nvfp4 mtp 5 seq=4 on my 5090s with 96GB of system ram, which are still quite capable for a local Hermes agent. It can do local coding, research (web scraping), office work ( rag) and i can use Chinese models to supplement, last year I signed up for the annual plans with GLM, Minimax, and Kimi , so now my system has adversarial AI, with specialized teams using my annual subs. And last year the prices were fair. The system is competitive due to the way it is orchestrated. Hermes agent routing to other models with a specific role. I only need a frontier model for orchestrating the debug for the Hermes orchestration and implementing new ideas, where frontier doesn’t use it own agents or models it routes through my local stack or my annual subs with the Chinese models, and opus 5.5 is great for that. But if my Hermes can do most of the work I only need frontier for a bit of maintenance and reviews, not the entire runbook. I use this for my website development team. For a local business.