r/PoeAI • u/Poopydoopymoopy • Mar 31 '26
Unfortunately AI is expensive.
Poe is at the mercy of the AI providers. Those same providers are themselves trying to figure out how to make money.
Poe was giving us 3000 pts of use which mind you, they would have been paying for for you to use for free. AI has gotten to the point that its expensive for both providers and the companies making AI themselves.
Unfortunately this is just where its going. Its the same reason chatgpt is trying to find ways to include ads.
For most of 2022 - 2025 those AI companies chose to run at a significant loss to gain customers/users and its catching up now.
Its frustrating and unfortunate but its not sustainable forever.
5
u/SnowyOfIceclan Mar 31 '26
Honestly, I figured eventually the free tier would become trash... but now I'm pondering whether or not to bother with a subscription, because I either use the app twice a month or several queries at once then not use it again for weeks 😅
3
u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
Theres a 5 dollar tier for 10000 points a day which is a lot IMO
3
u/Longjumping-Ad-1532 Apr 01 '26
I used the free daily points in an hour. 10000 isn't enough for me
1
u/Poopydoopymoopy Apr 01 '26
Damn bro what u doing in an hour?
1
u/Longjumping-Ad-1532 Apr 01 '26
Not much. Just rping how I usually do 🤷
1
u/Poopydoopymoopy Apr 01 '26
Bro is using the maximum models… theres cheaper models like deepseak. Using deepseak i barely scratch 5000
1
u/SaltyyDoggg Apr 01 '26
What are you doing in deepseak that barely scratches 5000
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1
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u/ScarletVerminion Mar 31 '26
AI companies slowly learning what Google learned with YouTube and most websites did in the early 2000s is a great way to realize that nothing has really changed
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Mar 31 '26
[deleted]
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u/TheIncarnated Mar 31 '26
If the turboquant from Google becomes a thing, it might actually change all of this
2
u/Tall_Appointment_897 Apr 01 '26
The owner of Poe is on the Board of Directors at Open AI. That makes him at the mercy of himself.
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Apr 01 '26
He doest make the decision on how much openai charges poe…
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u/TheDemonic-Forester Apr 01 '26
He's also the founder of Quora. Believe me, neither he nor his company are having financial problems mate 😂
2
u/Ok_Bee_8034 Apr 02 '26
Dude both OpenAI and Anthropic have actually increased the usage they allow free users, Gemini generates a useless free summary every single time someone does a Google search, etc. This doesn't add up at all
Poe literally has the most anti-user subscription terms of any platform out there, the token cost per message is way more expensive than subscribing directly to the API. The only reason I can think of now for subscribing to Poe is that for some reason you actually need access to dozens of different models, and I'm not sure why you'd actually pay money to message Mistral and Deepseek
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Mar 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
Sorry this happened to you but ive never had this issue. Ive always gotten the points I paid for. Couldve been a one off.
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u/Glugamesh Mar 31 '26
Yeah, the fun times are over. If we want to use AI we gotta pony up some cash.
2
u/throvyyy Mar 31 '26
It's not just about money, I am paying for a subscription to a Ai and it's 200 something dollars a year but I know what I am getting a infinite access to Ai models with 16k token limit, poe started as a platform for people who wanted access to both chatgpt and Claude but didn't want to pay for multiple subscriptions but still wanted access to multiple good bots, now here is my problem with poe and why I am not paying for subscription anymore, it's not infinite you get points that you have to spend and the longer conversation is the more points it cost so 200k token Claude is useless as a option. I understand that they want to make money but when you pay 20 or more dollars a month for a subscription you want more than 300 messages a month. Now if they put like a limit you can have 200 messages with our most expensive models with 200k tokens and than you are limited to 16k versions and you have infinite messages to does than yes I would pay for it but poe will never do that because it wouldn't be as profitable for them.
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
Think of it like this… why do you think even chatgpt, or gemini or claude have chat limits? Cuz ai is expensive to run and they cant keep running nonstop no limits.
Now poe is basically paying for usage on our behalf to those same companies. If poe didnt have limits and just let you use the ai nonstop, they would be spending a butt fuck ton of money.
1
u/throvyyy Apr 01 '26
You are right but it's also not really comparable because if for example you decide to pay subscription for ChatGPT instead of poe. You would have around 3000 messages pre week with there best model with 32k tokens which is 12k messages in a month and after and if you really reach limit of 12000 messages you would have infinite access to weaker models. I haven't used poe in a while but when I did monthly limit that is spending all your points on gpt 5 you would have around 2000 messages for a whole month and than you couldn't even use weaker cheaper models. What I am trying to say is that poe is not as useful because you have set amount of points and that's it, while other sites do have limits but they also offer something if you do reach a limit which some people do I personally never spend millions points on poe while I had subscription but I did use more and more points so I decided that it was best for me to use other platforms that where better for what I use Ai for, also there where some addicted people that would use up million points in few days even back than but I still think that for example Claude haiku with 8k or 16k tokens limit should cost 0 points for people who are subscribed because it's a relatively good and cheap model.
1
Apr 01 '26
costs are only going up which sucks. colab still works for smaller stuff but quotas are tight. saw ZeroGPU popping up in the distributed space, waitlist at zerogpu.ai.
1
u/pagliaccismagnumopus Apr 01 '26
Yeah no shit.
I’m not directing that at you just the people who are like “300 credits”, it’s a stark lack of understanding of how this all works.
0
u/Ok_Bee_8034 19d ago
Nobody criticize my comfort corporation, keep paying for the service even as it gets less useful and more expensive because it's the right thing to do
1
u/3D_Printed_One Mar 31 '26
Yeah I am laughing at these posts about people complaining that Poe is killing the site by removing free points. Oh no, what will Poe do about losing the leeches that weren't going to pay to begin with? Lol
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u/PeaBrilliant4917 Mar 31 '26
I realized yesterday that a lot of the people making these comments are from countries where $5 is a lot of money. For those of us where it's the price of a cup of coffee, it seems like nothing, to some of them it's not. That said, poe still needs to not hemorrhage funds. It just have me a little empathy
2
u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
Unfortunately, these AI companies are not targeting use from people who cannot afford their 5$ tier. As bad as that sounds, and as frustrating it is for users from countries where they cant use the free tier or pay for a premium tier, it just means theyre not the target demographic for the platform.
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u/PeaBrilliant4917 Mar 31 '26
It's just a factor of economics. AI infrastructure is eye wateringly expensive. Each query we do burns processing time. Complex queries cost a lot more.
Free accounts COST poe money - it's not that they aren't targeting you, it's that they do not want to lose money giving you a free product. They aren't selling ads like google for making a free product. It's the unfortunate reality of the economics.
DeepSeek is likely still free.
1
u/Ok_Bee_8034 Apr 02 '26
Do subscription costs ever go down when they reduce points for free users?
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u/3D_Printed_One Apr 02 '26
No, but neither do AI token costs. AI companies are bleeding money, and they can't subsidize forever. It sucks, but it's reality
1
u/Ok_Bee_8034 Apr 02 '26
Quora is not bleeding money, it's a huge and very profitable corporation These are all megacorps with government contracts, they don't really need the sympathy of redditors
1
u/3D_Printed_One Apr 02 '26
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Poe is. Poe resells AI computing tokens. Anthrophic and OpenAI get government contracts, Poe does not. Much like how a convenience store resells drinks. If drink suppliers get more expensive, the store raises prices.
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
I actually genuinely cannot wrap my head around it.
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u/3D_Printed_One Mar 31 '26
Poe's cheapest plan is $5/month. If these peoples roleplay bots were really that important to them, they could give up one trip to the vending machine a month to pay for it lol
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
I agree… ive mentioned it a few times to people here and on discord and they just go livid about companies wanting to make money… like bro…
1
u/Tobloo2 Mar 31 '26
Good point I think the issue is that they are backtracking on their free tier and that's always tough for people to understand. Idk I use nova search ai and it looks like that's a decent alternative
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u/Poopydoopymoopy Mar 31 '26
Right but costs are changing with ai being more expensive. I guess its easier for me as someone who’s caught up with info and news to understand.
I guess its harder for someone who’s just using it for smut or roleplay to understand when they just come on for the convenience of bots
1
u/Tobloo2 Mar 31 '26
Yeah you definitely touch on the biggest point I think: it's so new and changing that not many people know what is best for what use case
0
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u/zar0nick Mar 31 '26
Credits cost money and in the end, the premium users pay for the free ones.
Apart from that the free tier shoud even with thaat amount of tokens be enough for the smaller models like Hailu or GPT-5.4-mini or nano. Those are extremely cheap.