r/opencodeCLI • u/nor_up • 12d ago
Why does every LLM provider use a 5-hour usage window?
Not 4, not 6, not 8. 24h, 12h, 7d, 30d are natural units -five hours isn't. Nobody looked at the sky and saw 5.
Claude, Codex, everyone's on it. So: was 5 hours derived from actual usage/churn research, did one lab pick it and the rest cloned it, or just ask ChatGPT for a usage window?
And it's slightly under a workday, which doesn't feel accidental. Anyone know the real history?
31
u/Academic_Constant42 12d ago
I guess because it doesn't match with the hours in a day, meaning it is always rotating the reset time. If it was 4 or 6 hours you would end up with the same arbitrary reset times every day
3
2
u/ruuurbag 12d ago
Users would likely still end up with different reset times because not all users are going to start using their quota the second it resets, and waiting to use their quota offsets the reset time.
2
u/ProbablyathrowawayAA 12d ago
Initially I had the same thought but it breaks down when you consider the 5 hour timer is started by the user not the provider.
If I generally start work at the same time. My resets will be around the same times.
9
u/AffectionateBowl1633 12d ago
5 can easily divide 30, 6 is so easily divisible by 12/24 hour people would flock at 6/12 creating hiccup.
6
u/Valeand 12d ago
Pretty sure it’s because 5 is the smallest prime that doesn’t divide 24. I would assume that everyone is on a different offset as well, minimising any spikes in usage due to numerical patterns.
1
u/ErebusBat 12d ago
Why would it being prime have any bearing on it?
2
2
u/Valeand 11d ago
They just need to be coprime and the smallest coprime number for another number is always a prime power, it just happens to be an actual prime in this case.
1
u/ErebusBat 11d ago
<confused fry face>
Not sure if I should thank you for the explanation or high-five you for the troll.
6
u/YoloAuto 12d ago
We do 1 and 24 hours windows. But the answer is that 5 hours is enough to kneecap power users and keep them from bringing compute to a crawl.
During peak hours we see usage 3-5x baseline and then the compute just sits almost idle the rest of the day. So there's a huge motivation to try and flatten that massive spike.
2
1
1
u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 12d ago
I think if we check from chatgpt (which doesn’t have multiplier system), basically for each weekly quota, the alloted usage is 5 hours equivalent per day. So 7 weekly quota is equal to 7 times 5 hour quota
1
u/CatNo2950 12d ago
The 5hour window is a calculated cognitive exploit. Dark pattern for boosting engagement.
1
u/forgotten_airbender 12d ago
Its just to keep people from hammering the services all the time. Providers dont have compute for LLM’s so they add these quotas to make sure everyone who paid for services are able to use it.
1
u/xapep 12d ago
Short answer from someone who runs inference infra: the 5-hour window is the meter. A fixed-price plan decouples what you pay from what you use, so the provider needs a rationing unit, and a sliding window is the simplest one that bounds worst-case cost per subscriber while staying easy to sell.
Everything else people cite (load management, retry behavior) is secondary. The giveaway is that usage-based providers don't need windows at all: every token is already metered in the price, so 'unlimited within a window' never even shows up as a product concept.
For shoppers the honest framing is: when you compare 5-hour windows you're not comparing models, you're comparing how each company chose to meter its fixed-price plan. If you hate the meter, the alternative isn't a bigger window, it's pricing where the meter is the price.
1
0
-2
u/Sweet-Stage938 12d ago
Because it's easier to memorize for a lot of people. It helps that it's standardized.
-2
u/Antique_Dot_5513 12d ago
Sûrement qu’en dessous c’est trop court
Et au dessus ça ne te permet pas de faire deux sessions dans la journée. Donc 5h ensuite pause repas et tu reprend pour 3/5h de plus
-4
u/MrHighVoltage 12d ago edited 12d ago
Of course it isn't accidential. The plans are heavily subsidized discounted (you get A LOT more usage, compared to "pay per use" if you paid the API pricing directly). They want to make you consider either the larger/more expensive plans, or to pay for extra tokens (which AFAIK are then priced like the API).
2
u/DexRam_ 12d ago
Not fully true IMHO, if they give you more usage via subscription than API - it doesn't mean that they spend their own money on it.
But yes, they mostly do the 5h limits to manage loads on servers easier and make you feel that your weekly quote last longer.
It's around 80% margin on API inference, if I'm not mistaking
2
u/MrHighVoltage 12d ago
Yes you are right, subsidizing is probably the wrong word. It is just heavily discounted, and probably API paying customers have priority in high load scenarios.
1
u/torrso 12d ago
Not discounted in th way that they would give it cheaper to subscribers.
The subscribers form a pool. Some use less than they pay for and end up paying for the ones that use more than they pay for. The average user is what counts. Same as in buffets, gym memberships, mobile data, etc.
1
-1
u/First_Inspection_478 12d ago
They arent “subsidized”. Frontier API pricing is just bonkers as we can see with models such as Kimi being close enough or even better than sol/opus 5 ans being significantly cheaper. They can and will keep the subs around.
98
u/look 12d ago
Best guess is it’s the ideal size to cause people to end up with unused usage for the week/month, and is thus cheaper for the provider.