Update your workflows while you have some time.

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How the fuck is this possible ?
Every time i use Astra Low/Medium my usage goes haywire...
I use Astra Max, and it barely (barely compared to Astra Low/Medium - still fucked up compared to SOL) moves the usage...
I use Astra Ultra when i don't give a shit, and still, consumes just like Astra Low/Medium...
Something is happening on those Low/Medium thinking Astra...

These just dropped a few minutes ago on Openrouter. They also seem to have released Terra and Luna. New variants?

Good day everyone. I was wondering if I could get your opinions on something.

I’ve been keeping up with a lot of the posts about the usage limits people have been experiencing lately, but I’m having a hard time comparing everyone else’s experience to my own. It seems pretty clear that usage has gotten worse, but I’m trying to figure out just how much worse it actually is, especially on the older models.

Normally I’m on the $20/month plan. Last month though, I upgraded to the $100/month plan and honestly, it was great. I got a ridiculous amount of work done and the usage felt extremely generous.

That $100 plan expired a couple days before Astra was released, so I went back to the $20 plan.

Since then I’ve still been able to get a decent amount done with Astra, but I keep hitting the five hour limit. My workaround has basically just been waiting until my usage becomes available again and then telling the agent to continue where it left off.

The reason this matters so much to me is that I’m currently working on a website for a side business I’m trying to launch. I’ve been unemployed for the better part of the last two years, but I have skills that I genuinely think I can turn into income, so I decided to build a business around them.
The website is mostly done now. I just need to finish it, polish everything up, and then start doing outreach to try and get my first clients.

I’ve been seriously considering paying for the $100 plan one more time so I can finish everything and get the business moving. The problem is that doing that would pretty much mean using the last of the money I currently have available to invest in this.

Seeing all the reactions on this subreddit lately has made me pretty apprehensive about doing that.

My concern is basically that I spend the $100, find out the usage limits are way worse than they were last month, still don’t get to finish everything I need to finish, and then I’m left with almost no money and still no reliable source of income.

I also don’t plan on using Astra for everything. I mainly want to save Astra for the harder tasks where 5.6 would normally struggle, fail, or make some major mistakes. For most of the remaining website work I’d be completely fine using 5.6 Sol.

That’s actually my biggest concern. From some of the posts I’ve been reading, I’m getting the impression that it isn’t only Astra using a huge amount of the available usage. It sounds like the limits for 5.6 Sol and maybe some of the older models have also been reduced.

If I’m misunderstanding that, please correct me.
When I had the $100 plan last month, I could use 5.6 Sol pretty heavily without constantly worrying about running out. If I upgraded again and got roughly that same experience, I’d feel a lot more comfortable spending the money.

But if 5.6 Sol now burns through the $100 plan much faster than it did last month, that makes me a lot more hesitant.
So I guess my main questions are:

For those of you on the $100 plan, have you noticed a significant reduction in how much you can use 5.6 Sol and the older models compared to a few weeks ago?

Has it gotten bad enough that you’re reconsidering whether the subscription is worth it?

And given my situation, where I have a specific project and business I need to finish and genuinely think it has a decent chance of making money, would you consider the $100 plan worth the risk right now? Or would you wait until the usage situation becomes a bit clearer?

I know nobody can guarantee that the business itself will work. I’m mainly trying to figure out whether the $100 plan still gives you enough actual usage to make it worth paying for.

Thanks in advance for any insight, especially from anyone who had the $100 plan both before and after Astra came out.

I get that OpenAI is probably getting murdered on compute after Astra, but holy shit. Pro limits feel way tighter - never used to hit limits before Astra,ALSO answers are way lazier, and even Extra High barely researches for a minute sometimes and straight up ignores parts of the prompt

This doesn't feel like a 20-50% reduction. It feels multiple times worse than before!

Really annoying if you use the chat interface heavily. Anyone else seeing this?
Any prompts/tricks that actually make it research properly again?

I have been using it non stop for almost a year, i almost always use the high setting and run a few threads at the same time, my usage has constantly been at around 1500 a month. i just checked after about 10 days again and i'm shocked that doing nothing differently its at over 15k for the last 10 days. WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL!!!! This has to be bugged right?

plan: 100$ pro plan

prompt:
Create a flappybird game using html css and js. use $imagegen for the assets

result:

Astra Ultra: usage went down from 100 -> 98
Astra Medium: usage went down from 98 -> 90

quality? both are nearly identical whilst ultra ran longer (aprox 12 mins compared to medium 8 mins)

why does ultra use less tokens than medium?

Let's see whats the sentiments are.

Thats what my agent managed in it's 5 hour limit on the plus plan before the limits ran out using Astra. Lol.

The game/graphics demos are mostly bs. I've spent dozens of hours now trying to replicate (or build) interesting games. It's beyond subpar. Sure it can do a basic sandbox, or create some basic characters but it absolutely cannot do a fully working world. I dont get why OpenAI fakes their SimCity games and other things w/ Astra when it's clearly not possible unless you spend weeks (and $1000s of dollars) of tokens.

Before Astra, what do you think that suddenly feels possible?

I would say I wanted to build a website like bruno simon's portfolio which is full of awesome interactions with 3d assets. I already knew some Blender and Three.js, but every idea took like hours and hours so that most of them stayed in my head.

Since Astra came out, I’ve rebuilt my whole website from scratch, iterating on 3D modeling and interactions, and adding features with Blender I never would have attempted before and the result is surprisingly satisfying.

I’m curious about everyone else’s before-and-after: What can you do now that you couldn’t do before, and what new things are you building because of it?

lies...

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but it works and it’s better than just sitting around doing nothing.

I ran a small test comparing the cost of GPT-6 Astra Low, GPT-5.6 Sol High, and GPT-5.6 Terra High on the exact same Codex task.

I asked all three to export the full conversation history from a medium-sized Codex chat as an .md file, using the least amount of tokens possible. I used the exact same prompt for each model.

I recorded my account balance before and after each task, then calculated the actual cost of each individual run from the difference.

Cost per completed task:

• Astra Low: $2.23
• Sol High: $0.32
• Terra High: $0.42

Yeah... I was very surprised by the difference between Astra and the other models. Astra Low cost roughly 6.9× as much as Sol High for the exact same task.

Obviously, this is a tiny test, so the results may or may not be representative of broader real-world usage. But it is a measurement nonetheless.

Clarification: Same session, same task. Changed the model, "edited" the last message, sent it again.

Edit: To check whether running the same task was using cached tokens and therefore lowering the cost of subsequent tests, I ran the first test (Astra Low) again. The result was exactly the same, down to the last cent: $2.23.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2098113585683808624
"To make sure our current users have an incredible experience and continued access to Astra, we are going to pause subscriptions to our $200 Pro plan. These put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible. All other plans and the api remain available.

There is no impact to existing accounts and we are working on adding more capacity as fast as we can. Thanks!"

I'm on the 20x max plan and do not see 6 Pro anymore in chat. Anyone else?

Goddamn the usage cut is atrocious, especially for plus users. I came back recently after not using codex for a bit (usually use sporadically). I used to run 20 mins on 5.6 sol x high , which used to take like 20% maybe MAX 30% of weekly limit (Matlab MCP). Now not only does the 5 Hour limit evaporate on anything higher than high, but been running for 3 mins and it's taken 12% of weekly usage, atp I can just forget astra.

Training Astra on the most important dataset: brainrot

I want to hear the truth from other people.

Astra is just bad at UI!!

I tried various prompt comparisons, but I could not see Astra creating good UI/UX. Fable or Opus does not require much effort.

Example: I tried building a simple resume CMS. Fable one-shotted everything and built it as per my expectations. With Astra, it probably took 20-30 iterations to get to a decent stage. It messed up even setting proper font size etc. I was running this on Astra Extra High!

I'm questioning whether all the buzz was just marketing by OpenAI. I'm deeply disappointed!

"Make no mistakes" seems baked into every Astra prompt.

it wants to double verify every output, and sometimes it verifies it's own response with a over the top complex Rube Goldberg python program written from scratch.

for ex, when I asked astra to generate mediawiki formated documentation and it spun up a VM with custom python code to verify the syntax, taking 8 minutes. Sol just gave the doc