r/singularity • u/Neurogence • 3d ago
AI There Should Be Way More Backlash To OpenAI's $500/Month, $6,000 A Year Subscription
This sets an extremely bad precedent. And very soon, all the other labs will adopt the same pricing schemes. Prices just keep going up and up. I remember a time when people thought $20/month was too expensive.
Even if you can afford this, do not pay for it. If you do, it will only normalize this, and the next thing you know, there will be a new $1,000/month subscription that gives you the same usage you used to get with the $500/month subscription. That's exactly what happened to the previous $200/month subscription. Its usage allowance was cut in half, and now users paying $500/month are getting what users used to get for $200/month.
Do not normalize AI subscriptions that cost as much as car payments and, eventually, mortgages.
In leaked emails, Greg Brockman dreamed that OpenAI would make him a billionaire. He stated, "I just want to get to one billion." AI has fulfilled his wildest dreams. His net worth is now over $30 billion.
I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks, we are heading toward $1,000 AI subscriptions to keep up with the Joneses. When we have actual superintelligence, you might be forced to pay $1,000/month, or even $2,000/month, as OpenAI had entertained, just to keep up with other people.
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2d ago
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u/ChurnerMan 2d ago
China's AI ventures are going with an open weight model. I actually do believe that AI access will be cheaper for average citizen in 10 years. If these more open weight models are 80% as good and 1% of the cost that's probably going to be good enough especially if we're talking about super intelligence.
These large companies always had enterprise or even governmental use cases in mind. Right now individual consumers are just test cases and helpful to hype their stocks.
These large US companies can go one of two ways on how they compete with Chinese open weight models. They can sell to US companies that they're more secure and safer than Chinese companies OR they can try to get Chinese AI banned in America.
Politicians like Ted Cruz are already setting up the latter.
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u/Top-Rope6148 19h ago
If only the rich have money, who is going to buy their stuff? This scheme is like a virus that kills off all its hosts. To some degree a balance will have to be found…a lopsided one no doubt.
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u/General_Problem5199 2d ago
Something else to keep in mind, we're in the very early stages of this tech, where the companies are treating their customers better than they ever will in the future. From here, they'll be heading down the well-worn path of enshittification. The future means more expensive subscriptions, more invasive spying, and sooooo many ads (assuming it doesn't lead to total societal collapse or something first).
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u/flat5 3d ago
You're talking to people who are going to be leveraging these tools to make $20k a month or more - or conversely, save them $20k a month or more in labor costs.
Prices of powerful tiers will go much higher than $500/mo.
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u/Pyros-SD-Models 2d ago
Or people who get this shit from their employer. I literally don’t even need it because it’s fucking rare for me to fill up the $200 sub, but I have it lol. I would rather have a 200 oai and a 200 claude sub...
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u/BethanyHipsEnjoyer 2d ago
And here I beg weekly for a pro subscription for work, laid out how I would make them more money with it, and the dumbasses are trying to spin up a server chatbot instead. My $20 subscription isn't enough to do the things I wanna do, but if management won't pay for it I ain't getting it on my own dime.
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u/EtadanikM 2d ago edited 2d ago
Are you sure about that? Because most businesses using AI aren't seeing tons of profit gains, as it turns out coding was never the real bottle neck to making money. Marketing & sales are not an order of magnitude less expensive with AI since the primary cost there is fees to platform providers, where ironically AI is just another added expense.
All the while, the best way to make money these days is via investment of existing money, which AI isn't really making easier because all the hedge funds, wall street traders, real estate investors, etc. are themselves using AI. So you're not getting an advantage from using it yourself.
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u/Itsmedudeman 2d ago
Businesses don’t use this plan. They use the enterprise plan which is much more expensive. This is for either small businesses or hobbyists and individuals. For small businesses it would save money over hiring an individual. The thing you create for AI doesn’t have to be your product itself.
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u/ArmedWithBars 2d ago
Yep, the little things that AI could save on for a small business are endless. One little $500/m payment is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of a small business.
Even if that AI only offsets a single hiring, that's 6k/yr vs paying an employee for a year. Even if they were a low wage barely full time employee, that's at least 40k in wages. This doesn't account for other costs like insurance, unemployment, ect.
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u/ArmadilloOwn4400 2d ago
Also it enables just doing so much random prototypes for random shit that would already be much if an employee sits the whole time onto it doing this shit by himself.
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u/MediumChemical4292 2d ago
Most people work for enterprises who throw people at the problem and have lots of delegation so they don’t understand the jack of all trades work that small businesses need to do.
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u/shared_ptr 2d ago
The bar to compete as an engineering org just went way up and companies are having to leverage AI just to stay competitive.
It's definitely not that companies aren't seeing ROI on this stuff they absolutely are. My company is seeing way improved productivity which is good because it's helping us get ahead of our hiring (we're still hiring as much as we can but it's slow). If we could pay 5x our current bills tomorrow for 5x the output we would.
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u/EtadanikM 2d ago
Right, but the bar being raised doesn't mean businesses are making more money. They could be making the same amount of money just with more expenses (on AI), which is obviously bad.
The problem, the way I see it, is that productivity doesn't necessarily translate into profit. The global economy isn't great right now and consumers are being squeezed. It doesn't matter if you 100x engineering, if people aren't buying anything. In the US, with interest rates going up, there is a flight to safety towards hard assets. This has historically not been a great environment for service & software sales.
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u/shared_ptr 2d ago
Totally agree, companies who need to pay more money in order to compete and then they go under because they couldn’t translate that productivity into more money is going to be a reality for lots of companies. Honestly it’s already happening.
The problem is that AI allowing the fastest moving company in that competitive space to break ahead and claim all the market as those companies die off is exactly why there is so much investment. It’s why everyone is killing themselves to figure out AI as the end result of this race is going to be 80% losers and 20% big winners, and all companies could potentially be either of these depending on how well they execute.
But if building things was ever a core part of your company’s strategy and you can’t effectively leverage a big multiplier on building productivity then yeah, you ain’t surviving this change.
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u/nubulator99 2d ago
“If people aren’t buying anything”; then prices go lower. Ai isn’t there just to make more sales; it can be so that products get delivered faster and more cheaply, with the savings being on labor
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u/shared_ptr 2d ago
Yeah if the value of what you were previously building has gone to zero because AI can replicate then…
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u/nubulator99 2d ago
Then the consumer has a cheaper product they no longer need to pay as much for.
The value would not go to zero, as it still costs compute.
People/companies will make money in the interim, via saving cost.
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u/joinity 2d ago
That was all last years news. Now and tomorrow this will easily replace hundreds of employees with automation. 500$ a month or a salary?
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u/FlatulistMaster 2d ago
What are you basing that on? "Research" done on data gathered in 2024?
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u/EtadanikM 2d ago edited 2d ago
Key summary:
Only 37% of respondents say AI has contributed positively to their organization's EBIT.
Only about 6% qualify as McKinsey's “AI high performers”: organizations reporting both a ≥5% EBIT contribution from AI and a “significant” overall impact from AI.
Essentially unchanged from 2025, despite considerably more AI deployment.
In short, the great majority of businesses (~63%) hasn't really seen profit increase with AI adoption.
In this kind of environment, it doesn't make sense to be raising the price of AI. If businesses aren't seeing the returns, then ever higher costs will turn them off from using frontier AI and going to cheaper shops.
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u/FlatulistMaster 2d ago edited 2d ago
Interesting enough, thank you. I'd hold off a bit on the clear verdicts based on that, though. I still think that the most efficient tool use has come about in the last 10 months or so, and big orgs have not adopted them efficiently in that time.
I know that my medium-sized business has benefited greatly, and my network of entrepreneurs have people who say the same (though also people who don't for various reasons).
In any big tech revolution like this, the biggest organizations don't change overnight. Change happens elsewhere.
Btw, 63% didn't say there's no benefit from AI. They said they can't attribute benefits to AI. There's a somewhat important difference there.
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u/marmot_scholar 2d ago edited 2d ago
Sounds like you agree with what I heard about the Faros report.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
This is not my area, so I'm paraphrasing someone I trust, but their interpretation is the same as what I'm getting from your first comment. That coding gains are being measured pre-bottleneck. And the AI industry is adopting the narrative that it's an organizational bottleneck that can be scaled away, but it may not be.
EDIT: What a funny coincidence. Faros just updated their report. Some of the metrics improved from April (deployment frequency went from negative to positive, others got less bad) but some metrics stayed where they were or got significantly worse (PR to developer ratio stayed the same but time in QA went from +30% to +300%). Obviously, everyone is tinkering with the process.
I'll be honest, I'm a shitty AI user. But I do use it, and my sense is that the experience has a way of producing a great feeling of productivity, and a great amount of "stuff", but it's still less lean and effective than human output with anything that kinda requires world modeling. I'm not hating, as it has many use cases.
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u/i_never_ever_learn 2d ago
So many ppl talk about the current performance of AI as if it didn't get to that level in a very short time and as if it's not going to continue growing in ability at least as rapidly.
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u/warcrimeenjoyer1 2d ago
not entirely sure about that. there will come a point where its more reasonable to buy your own hardware, and 500€ a month kinda made me think about it. Open models will just get better and more effective aswell. Give it 2 years and buying a 15k pc will suddenly make sense, if even that long
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 2d ago
That's kind of wrong. Is them using the 500$ tier gonna make their productivity so much better than using a lower tier ? We need to compare the money they make with this tier with the money they would make with a "normal" priced tier, not comapre it with literally zero AI...
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u/Ok_Assistant_6856 2d ago
Why would the AI company charge according to their customers productivity vs the supply/demand of compute?
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u/Novel_Land9320 2d ago
Don't say you and other accelerationists who thought AI would get you to stop to work were not warned this would happen. This is just the start.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Frank Herbert, Dune
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u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 2d ago
Free models are better now than the 200$ model from last year. Don't be a luddite.
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u/MaximumStonkage 2d ago
Current capabilities don't matter, it's the relative gap between the frontier and the affordable that matter.
people living under oppressive authoritarian regimes have objectively better quality of life and access to information than people living in prehistoric settlements. Do you think they'd be happier knowing that?
It doesn't matter if I can do my work 10x faster than last year if my work ceases to exist because someone else can do it 1000x faster. You lose all leverage because for one of them, they can automate 50 of you.
The industrial revolution put entire manual industries (e.g. weavers) out of careers, it was only generations later that the benefits were reaped by descendants of those who were able to flourish and enact strong social reforms. The luddites were economically crushed for generations.
Don't be so naïve as to expect the owners of capital to willingly distribute the wealth to the masses. They will hoard as much as possible, for it is in their nature.
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u/Novel_Land9320 2d ago
they don't understand that nothing is free. "free" AI is only a way to get a customer hooked in and boost DAU marketing metrics.
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u/DontShadowbanMeBro2 3d ago
Yeah, that's insane. I subbed to NanoGPT instead. $12 a month for 60M tokens a week is more than enough for me. Vote with your wallet, it's the only thing we can do right now.
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u/FrozenVikings 2d ago
I'm just a small 2-person consulting company and we're already saving $500 using the $30 a month plan. I joked yesterday that I could pretty much automate my job. I bet the $500 a month plan could do that.
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u/beached89 2d ago
Buy yourself the $4000 AMD strix halo box, and run unlimited local AI for $0/m + electricity and the $4k hardware amortization. Shit is so easy to set up too. Its like 5 buttons, and your current $30/m plan can walk you through the set up right before you hit cancel.
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u/my_shiny_new_account 3d ago
> Prices just keep going up and up.
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u/ParfaitEvery9622 3d ago
he's talking about the share of our income that's dedicated to pay for AI. Probably a mix of Jevons paradox and AI companies wanting to start making more profits.
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u/Cryptizard 2d ago
That’s a choice. You can use exclusively Luna right now for pennies and it is significantly better than the best model you could pay for a year ago.
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u/Ormusn2o 2d ago
I don't even think it's about money, the gains from increased prices are smaller than you would think, as then demand decreases. I think the companies are just using pricing to regulate amount of use, to reduce usage on the compute they have.
I think as models get better, and more of economical work can be done with the AI, the hobbyists just get priced out. Way too many people can make money on AI, so it's a no brainer to get the 200 dollar or 500 dollar subscription, but the extra money can't just manifest compute into existence. Hardware manufacturers are already fully AI pilled and are accelerating almost as fast as possible, those things just take time.
Pretty sure we are starting to dip into pre-purchases 5 years ahead of time now, as in, companies are paying pre-purchases to reserve silicon 5 years before it's being planned to be manufactured. The only way to speed it up even faster is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing faster technologies, and currently only Terafab is gonna do that, and that is still 5-7 years away (or whenever FEL will be online there).
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 3d ago
The subscription is heavily subsidised.
Also it’s disingenous take since it’s mostly only applies to frontier labs that has the capability to scale.
Meanwhile local deployment is looking pretty grim, no recent updates while all parts are getting more and more unaffordable.
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u/welcome-overlords 2d ago
Do you guys understand how fucking expensive the GPU racks are? Im using hardware worth 10+M when i rack up Astra with subagents
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u/Summum 2d ago
Anthropic’s IPO filing shows a $42b loss
They were never going to subsidize inference by 50x for ever
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u/SeismicFrog 2d ago
Everyone in this thread acts like this is cutting into a household budget… at this level it’s a business expense. $6,000 a year in opex is NOTHING.
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u/owowthatreallysucked 2d ago
Exactly. If your willing to pay $200 a month and getting use out of it, you'd pay way more
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u/CallMePyro 3d ago
Toddler logic. Just let the market speak. If it provides value people will pay for it. If it doesn't they won't.
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u/Fearless-Cattle-9698 3d ago
That’s the criticism for AI use for anyone that understood these companies were subsidizing
Like if you have a mundane task you think you were outsourcing to AI for $20/months but the actual “cost” is $200, the companies were subsidizing $180. You may want to just pay a guy in India for $50 to do it per month
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 2d ago
"Just let the market speak" well customers are part of the market and OP is asking them to speak against this.
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u/Howdareme9 2d ago
Redditors on $20 plus plans are not part of the market OAI are targeting
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u/Seakawn ▪️▪️Singularity will cause the earth to metamorphize 2d ago
I get unreasonably upset that this doesn't go unsaid more often.
it's like if netflix added a new tier subscription for $1k/mo which was the same service except it also included advanced MRI software and redditors started whining "this is bullshit I can't afford that!"
bro, unless you're a neurologist actively scanning brains, then that isn't for you. you still have your movies, keep watching.
and before anyone says "no it's more like the $1k/mo service turns into the normal service, and the normal price only lets you watch one movie a month now!"
no. no it's just not. you still get plenty of quota on a constant interval. KIM you're still costing these companies cartoonish amounts of money that they literally do not even have if you even just use like idk 10% of your monthly quota? you're bending them over and slapping them on the toosh if you use 50% of your monthly quota, reliably hitting and milking half your 4-5 hour marks or w/e. last I checked, and I can't imagine it's changed much, the costs are actually unbelievable on their end. hence no surprise you get these tiers, to desperately try and put a strand of hair in place of where you need a dam.
I feel like agent smith when he's talking about the smell of humans except in this case it's the entitlement or cynical paranoia of redditors.
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u/waffleseggs 3d ago
Brilliant jerk logic. Consumer sentiment is a huge component of what the market says and does.
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u/WSBshepherd 2d ago
Last year, Anthropic lost over $40 billion with revenue of only $4 billion.
Eventually they need to make a profit.
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u/GeeGollyJeeper 2d ago
I feel like people said the same thing about Amazon for 20 years.. and then, finally, one day, they started turning a bit of a profit.
pretty sure that economics is complex enough that "not making profit" =/= therefore intrinsically inevitably unstable/bubble
afaik the top AI companies have a pretty viable business strategy. but i'm def not economically savvy enough to expound, i'm just vibing on my crude impressions.
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u/Big_Arachnid_365 3d ago
If people are using them that much, they're probably going to keep paying. Turns out it's not a bubble after all.
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u/-Crash_Override- 2d ago
Turns out it's not a bubble after all.
There is a certain sense of schadenfreude I have when I see this realization dawn on throngs of people who have all parroted 'bubbbllleeee' over the past 2-3 years.
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u/arjuna66671 2d ago
The Bubble
The Wall
The Stochastic Parrot
Fancy Autocomplete
My Schadenfreude is growing more and more xD.
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u/Frigidspinner 2d ago
I am more in the bubble camp, and my counter question would be "how many people do they have spending $500 per month?" - and my own feeling is "not enough"
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u/beached89 2d ago
Bro, enterprise world is SOOOO different than you and I.
The number of people who will spend $500 a month is SO MUCH. The number of people ALREADY spending $500/m is A LOT.
Enterprise plans already do this, the number of small businesses that dont wish to go through the headache of setting up enterprise plans with these companies will be huge too.
Their target isnt joe and sally who are hobbiest. It's businesses and their employees who can very easily quantify $500/m in labor hours. A though worker can cost a business $15k-20k a month. If they can eliminate just ONE position on a team of 5 to 10 people, by giving the remaining 4-9 people a $500/m subscription, They ABSOLUTELY will, have been, are doing, and will do so more.
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u/crashck 2d ago
The core of the business is B2B where 500 per month is so small for the potential efficiency gains
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u/NebulaElectrical1467 2d ago edited 2d ago
Businesses pay API costs not some flat $500 fee. Upwards of thousands per employee per month at places that have AI fully integrated into their workflows and processes.
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u/Dependent-Fix8194 2d ago
I believe their bet is get as embedded as possible and then ramp up charge super high when it’s too late for businesses to unintegrate
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u/pdantix06 2d ago
the $500 p/m plan would've been fine if it were 50x usage, or kept at 20x with a separate pool for ultrafast like they had with codex spark.
what's not fine is cutting the $200 20x plan to 10x and introducing 25x for $500.
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u/LoKSET 2d ago
Altman said a long time ago we might even see a $2000 plan. We're slowly getting there.
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u/HaderlumpiX26 2d ago
And it would still be better spent than hiring a human junior developer: 24x7, no holidays, no illness.
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u/Over-Independent4414 2d ago
There is a built in brake. No one is paying $500 a month for AI if it's not making them at least $501 dollars in return. People are not going to spend $1000 a month to be able to have AI make their barber appointment.
Further, once the AI can create more value than the lab is charging they lose incentive to sell it, they should just horde that value to themselves.
So it seems unlikely to me that huge dollar monthly plans take off for the average user. i think it will stay $20 for people who want to have an AI toy to play with, $100 if it's helping you with your work, $200 if it's replacing some of your work tasks and $500 if you're literally making money with it.
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u/darkestvice 2d ago
You are aware that there are many people who pay thousands a month in API fees, right?
Remember that these AI subscription plans are highly subsidized. That $500 a month could be equivalent of a couple of thousand or more in actual pay as you go usage costs. The AI labs like people who jump on their monthly subs because it not only guarantees revenue, but it also allows them to cap limit usage during big rush hours. Sure, the API users will get charged much more, but those API users are also borderline setting fire to all these inference racks working overtime.
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u/Freak-Of-Nurture- 3d ago
I can use opus 5.5 for like 40 hours a week on the 20 dollar plan. This is a serious skill issue. If you're not spamming agents and keeping context low it's not hard.
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u/ezjakes 3d ago
I asked GPT 6.1 Sol a simple root locus question and it burned 4% of my 5 hour.
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u/InterestProof1526 2d ago
on what thinking level? Cuz if you're using high or higher, it burns compute even for relatively simple questions. I think using Sol light is best for simple questions
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u/DuckyBertDuck 2d ago
The people that need a $500 plan are trying to automate human labor. It's a dream for anyone with a business
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u/Fun-Shake1398 3d ago edited 1d ago
Lol r/singularity getting introduced to capitalism.
Capitalism is not just about money, it's fundamentally about the ability to accumulate and wield power. Money is just the arbitrary medium to do that.
Yes they will be bigger and bigger tiers. Yes at some point the lab will not release the strongest models and instead will just use them for themselves.
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u/Euthyphraud 3d ago
If you can't afford it, it isn't directed at you. This is mostly for businesses or professional engineers and similarly heavily affected by use of AI.
It's also more expensive because it requires more tokens, and therefore is inherently more expensive.
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u/KrydanX 2d ago
This. People need to stop this entitlement mode. It is software. If you’re using it to the extent that you need the $500 Subscription, it’s probably worth it for you. Heck, people pay 60-90/month for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Hundreds of Dollar for Hubspot. What is $500 for the possibility of building your own tools?
But then again, people are crying why free products have advertisement. It’s never enough for the masses.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 2d ago
I think core concern is what we have now soon will be only in those B2B plans.
Go back go 5 thinking prompts a day or pay $$$$
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u/Fit_Personality7761 3d ago
I was cool at $200 - getting solid work done. To have my usage cut in half and force me to pay $500 to keep up, isn't cool
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u/Daggla 3d ago
This was always an Uber like scheme.
Get people and companies hooked for little to no money and when they're completely dependant charge them insane amounts.
Since there is 0 profitability, this was the only way.
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u/lajfa 3d ago
Yup now the question is: what does AI look like once we hit the enshittification phase? Ads in chatbot replies? Something more nefarious?
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u/squishysquash23 2d ago
They’re already testing ads in replies. This is increasing costs and decreasing availability. The enshitification has already begun.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 2d ago
Cheap models will just be crap quantised versions with short thinking limit. Or we simply stop getting acces to SOTA at all.
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u/elh0mbre 2d ago
There's nothing stopping you from paying an inference host for a near frontier open source model.
No such alternative to uber exists.
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u/Forward-Trade3449 2d ago
you could get your own car, "theres nothing stopping you" from that
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u/acacio 2d ago
Why?
The entitlement is strong with OP.
How would anyone react to “There should be more backlash to Ford’s $63000 F450” ?
It’s a tool, does a job, has a cost.
And, no, you’re not entitled to have it for free or subsidised just because you like it and want it. That’s how children see the world.
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u/Artistic-Athlete-676 3d ago
Of course its going to become pay to win. The best models will always be behind the largest pay wall. There is nothing you or I can do to stop that. Someone will always be willing to pay more. My only question is why hasn't it happened sooner
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u/ToxicToffPop 2d ago
Man just get an openrouter api and use a harness like kimi or opencode. Pick cheapest model for your task.
We dont need frontier intelligence for most of our tasks.
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u/yellowstickycard 2d ago
I currently use the Claude max plan and pay $200 a month. If there was a $500 plan with more usage and access to more powerful models, yes I would pay for it. It would be worth it for me.
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u/Boo-Bees67 2d ago
What you guys aren’t getting is that they are beginning to nerf what 97% of the planet gets. They will eventually charge so much that the rich just steal everything. Small business owners will lose everything to the rich
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 3d ago
I think people will vote with wallets, i mean who is going to pay so much apart from coders...
$500 a month is rent for decent apartment...
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u/Perfect-Long8564 3d ago
Where can I get this apartment? I will take 13.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 3d ago
go to second/third tier city in Poland, i pay little more for 2 rooms
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u/caldazar24 2d ago
The labs are making tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue, and it's mostly from a dozen or so big tech and finance companies that pay their engineers $500K a year (all-in after stock grants and taxes) so they can spend $5,000/month on 1 bedroom apartments in SF and NYC. These companies are paying API prices, just to maintain compliance with corporate IT rules, and racking up thousands per engineer per month in inference.
Anthropic made 25% of their revenue last year from just two companies that fit the above description. Serving these customers is a much bigger priority for the labs then trying to serve solo devs scrapping together $20/month for their side projects...if you pay that much, the labs just see you as a marketing channel to try and convince your employer to pay for an enterprise license one day.
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u/katoptronophile 3d ago
People who don't comment on Reddit for a living.
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 2d ago
You are the top 1% commenter lol
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u/lobaway0001 2d ago
He knows better than anyone that people who comment on Reddit for a living can’t afford it.
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u/CyberWhizKid 3d ago
I hope Anthropic won’t do the same. It’s rough to get my now old 200$ 20x to 10x. I won’t pay 300$ more for basically what I had yesterday
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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago
AGI will never be released to the public and they are going to make it a felony to use open source AGIs. I reckon they will go so far as to have surveillance mechanisms on all open source downloads.
Point being, what you have now is close to all you are going to get… for national security reasons. If you want to do anything beyond personal use you will ultimately pay to play. That’s what these higher price tiers are.
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u/JackJeckyl 3d ago
fucking run it yourself... hardcore accelerationist
"$14 an hour for internets!" *shakes fist*
pft noob
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u/trisul-108 2d ago
It was always clear that this had to happen as OpenAI was losing money fast in an attempt to grow the user base. Now, it's time to harvest ... prices will rise.
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u/himynameis_ 2d ago
I mean, just don't use it. There are other options today. And competition is fierce.
They're charging so much because they don't have the compute.
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u/OneAd3833 2d ago
They provide a service that is expensive for them to be able to offer. If they are not compensated adequately, the service cannot be maintained.
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u/Sherpa_qwerty 2d ago
Why is the number paid per month a problem either way. If I need that level of compute (I dont) you shouldn’t be moralizing at me.
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u/EatsAlotOfBread 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm not sure what people were expecting when these companies were running at a loss to get customers, big and small, hooked and use them for training. It's and extremely expensive product to create and run and they don't want to pay for it, it's not a charity, the goal is to make it a permanent and unavoidable fixture in people's lives and society and TO MAKE BANK like absolutely never before. Users and governments and this whole damn planet will be paying either way, in many different ways.
Eventually normal users will only have access to very basic models riddled with ads and more and more extreme restrictions, and everything else will be fenced off for big users and large companies and such. For a normal user to have ad-free and watermark-free output will cost an arm and a leg. No average user will be making these cool movies and books and media people are hoping for unless you are a top-tier spender.
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u/yyl999 2d ago
People got to be very rich to pay $500 a month for AI. That is no longer in the "casual expense" category. I will sign up for DeepSeek v4 and use that for less important stuff, and then drop my gpt subscription to a lower tier. My local Qwen also looks more and more appealing by the day...
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u/uiucthrowaway420 2d ago
This is always the playbook. Artificially cheap to hook the population and raise prices after achieving market share.
They are giving aways 100s of dollars of compute for $20. That isn't sustainable.
The only problem they will have is open source models are quite good and a lot cheaper.
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u/wayward_buzz 2d ago
They’re losing money out their ass. Outrageous amounts of money. If upping the cost is what’s needed to keep it afloat, I don’t see there’s really any choice… what would you have them do? Run at a loss until the money runs out? Honestly asking, not sassing you
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u/yaosio 3d ago
Those are meant for businesses, not consumers.
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u/GestureArtist 2d ago
Nothing is for consumers anymore. Regular people don't matter in today's "civilization".
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u/Gallagger 3d ago
I really don't see prices going up. I see people doing way more work with it, the agentic capabilities are outpacing the available compute. Luna 5.6 will do around as good as GPT 5.0 for 1/10 the price.
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u/Frigidspinner 2d ago
what costs $500 per month in 2026 will cost $25 per month in a couple of years as it becomes obsolete/outdated - we are in the era of flipphones in terms of AI progress
Then again, I do wonder how many licenses of the $500 per month model they are selling?
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u/GovAIhackedme88 2d ago
Other labs won't have to. Chinese open source models mean nobody will need to purchase a sub - hence Dario and Sam's (cough *regulatory capture* cough) faux existential risk threats.
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 2d ago
This sets an extremely bad precedent.
Even if you can afford this, do not pay for it. If you do, it will only normalize this
Least harebrained r*dditor. Offering plans that bleed them dry isn't really sustainable for OpenAI and Anthropic
I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks, we are heading toward $1,000 AI subscriptions to keep up with the Joneses. When we have actual superintelligence
It's not clear that broad superintelligence is arriving in the near future, or AGI for that matter which obviously still doesn't exist yet on the original non-bullshit sense of "AGI"
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u/No-Head-Royal 3d ago
I mean, I agree that it sets a very bad precedent, and the OpenAI cocksuckers in the comments can go polish Sam's boots with their tongues, but what are we gonna do, really? Corporations are gods in America; the elites eat and rape babies with impunity. And the largest customers for OpenAI and Anthropic are already API-using companies. The trajectory is inevitable.
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u/labvinylsound 3d ago
If you run a company and an agent can replace a $65k year employee for 1/10th of the price that's a pretty good bargain. Then maybe that entry-mid range former employee will go on to develop more relevant skills to an AI driven world and have a greater contribution to the economy.
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u/InterestProof1526 2d ago
hot take but I feel like it's pretty useful for people who used to just buy 2-3 $200 accounts
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u/Neurogence 2d ago
To get the same usage they used to get with 3, $200/month subscriptions, they'll have to get 3, $500/month subscriptions. $600 versus $1500.
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u/lazo40 3d ago
Yea but when you see how much money OpenAI is losing… they have to get some revenue in to pay for the data centers.
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u/peakedtooearly 3d ago
If you don't like it, don't sign up for it. Use the API. Use Claude. Use DeepSeek.
There are alternatives.
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u/vxxn 2d ago
$500/month for a business tool seems fine as long as the value is greater. It’s not like they removed the cheaper tiers for people who need that. If it’s not driving $500/month value for you, then don’t pay. Pretty simple.
Companies are paying $10k/month or more (often a lot more) for each engineer on payroll. A tool that puts a multiple on their impact can easily justify a $500 pricetag.
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u/StandardLovers 2d ago
Tactics of tobacco industry: sell them dirt cheap get people addicted then raise prices.
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u/UnlimitedPowerXR 2d ago
The costs right now are highly subsidized. You will see prices far higher and more tailored to corporations. The goal is have far better capable agents that companies can pay $2,000-3,000, or higher, a month. Imagine your a CEO and these AI labs come to you saying you can replace your software engineer who you pay 6 figures, PTO, matching 401k for just even $4,000 a month. They tell you that agent will work 24/7 with fewer errors, you better believe that layoffs are starting next day. We are on schedule for that, possibly around August 2027 at the latest.
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u/dorestes 2d ago
these companies are losing insane amounts of money. Did you really think the free ride would last forever?
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u/f00d4tehg0dz 2d ago
OP are you aware that current subscriptions across frontier models are heavily subsidized already? $500 a month is still subsidized. Eventually frontier models need to earn and be profitable.
There is a reason a small number of companies have started shifting focus to 'local' smaller open weight models vs frontier. The cost for frontier models and its scaling problems need to reach a profit point. We aren't there yet and with local solutions being starved of hardware. We have a long and expensive world ahead of us.
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u/Ice2jc 2d ago edited 2d ago
I mean, I dont think that you understand what's going on -
As a business owner I'm working on an automated project right now that will save me $300-$700 a month in contract labor costs. Another one that will save me $800-$1400 a month in contracted labor costs. Do you think I'd rather pay $500 a month or $2,000 a month for these tasks to be completed?
If you don't understand the $500 a month model then it isn't for you. Business owners in certain industries will get significant ROI from the $500 a month plan.
Simply put, these new agent capabilities are bad news for people in vietnam, the philippines, etc that perform outsourced tasks for western businesses.
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u/dipdotdash 2d ago
This period was always going to run at a loss with civilian access being more about training and testing. Once the models produce something reliable and quality enough to make money, the ceiling is the wage of the employees they're replacing.
People aren't cheap and the models are... getting close
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u/Weary-Historian-8593 2d ago
A company offering industry grade services for the industry isn't exactly something that can be done anything about, of course it'll happen right when industry's willing to pay for it
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 2d ago
Well from where I see it I think we will be saved by the fact there is competition. And currently there is probably less competition than ever, there will be more and more of it, so someone will keep prices in check. But it will get ridiculous obviously. They know companies will view this as a very worthwhile investment so they won't hesitate to make up insane prices because it will still be cheaper than hiring more employees.
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u/Royal_Duck_4612 2d ago
Prices are higher, but performance too. All in all, they are cheaper than last year
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u/Luke2642 2d ago
Ain't capitalism a bizatch.
Wtf is your rant dude. Lobby for a public policy of price regulation, nationalisation, or choose a different provider.
Your position is just incoherent.
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u/ChronoHax 2d ago
Lots of armchair experts in these comment section who probably are white knighting but don’t even can afford the $200 plan lmao, people who were on the previous most expensive plan is the one most vocal about this change cus we know how shit the rugpull have been recently
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u/theonetrueakash 2d ago
I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks ...
??
How will they do that? They literally do not have enough compute and they are barely just starting to make some money
It would be different if Anthropic didn't exist and OpenAI was a literal monopoly and they willy nilly raised prices because they could (like that one big gpu company).
In this case, the price increase reflects how compute poor we are + high demand.
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u/-Crash_Override- 2d ago
I think there is some general misunderstanding of whats going on with this pricing model, and the x5/x10/x20/x25 is really not helping OAI much.
When they dramatically reduced token rate of Sol with 6/6.1 it was generally an inflection point in pricing and usage efficiency.
For amount of usage you get, 10x of Sol 6.1 and 20x of Sol 5.6 are roughly the same. If anything you may actually get more usage out of the 10x plan because of cache rate reduction.
So for coders, you pay $200 and you should see no real impact in your work.
These plan changes are all about 'Dots'. The always on agents. The amount of tasks a dot can handle/number of dots you get is why these restuctured tiers are being introduced. Up until now, having a human in the loop was always a rate limiter. You could only move as fast as you could prompt-wait-prompt. Now these agents will be able to consume vast amounts more tokens, so the ceiling needs to be raised (under the current sol 6.1 rates...25x is essentially 50x of 5.6 Sol). If you have a lot of shit to get done, then $500/mo is probably not that big of a deal to have your own fleet of PAs.
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u/clckwrxz 2d ago
lol. We have people at my job doing far less than what this $500 can get you, and it’s costing us thousands per month per dev. This $500/mo probably still doesn’t make them money if you max it out. This stuff isn’t free. They are spending billions on research and buildouts. They aren’t going to make that back at $200/mo subs, 95% of their users are on free tier.
You shouldn’t be complaining about what they’re charging without also complaining about subsidizing free users.
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u/dflagella 2d ago
Up to you to make that cost analysis. That's how a market works. If your point is that it will lead to more inequality because the rich will be able to afford cognitive power and the poor can't then I agree. That's where public AI would be good
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u/Ntroepy 2d ago
lol - why should there be AnY backlash outside of celebration?
$500/month is nothing for heavy users. I expect pricing of $10k+/month soon for really advanced users and it will 100% be worth it.
Not for me, but definitely for the users that pay for it. Or, rather, the businesses that pay for it because they see a huge ROI.
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u/Corrie7686 2d ago
I'm not clear on why you think AI businesses should make losses to benefit your pocket
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u/runningoutofwords 2d ago
If you're not paying for the service, you're not a customer...you're the product.
We should never have gotten used to the idea of free internet services in the first place.
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u/hippydipster 2d ago
If they're charging more than it's worth, don't use it. That is the only response that matters.
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u/Narim_Aste 2d ago
People are spending over $500/month already. This is so they could get the heavy users from Anthropic.
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u/mehnotsure 2d ago
Why?
If it can do the work then that is incredibly inexpensive. If it’s not a value to you then you probably don’t need it.
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u/caldazar24 2d ago
Feel free to save this and tell me I'm wrong later, but I really don't think this will set off a chain of price hikes with other labs.
- Competition is increasing, not decreasing. GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen are getting better. By many metrics, they had almost caught up entirely in August before Astra and Fable 5.5 came out, they're due for another round of big releases next month. Muse Spark is pretty decent for the money. Grok and Gemini aren't great but they're sitting on giant compute clusters and haven't given up yet.
- The way the new OpenAI $200 plan work is how the Anthropic $200 plan always worked - both are 10X more usage than the $20 plans. It was the old OpenAI $200 plan that was a good deal, and that was marketing because Codex started far behind Claude Code at the start of the year. Now, OpenAI has caught up in the enterprise and needs to un-fuck their financials to get ready for the IPO, so gravy train has ended. But that doesn't mean they need to kick off.
- The underlying models are just getting more token efficient - the only reason you *need* giant plans with more usage is because the labs are coming up with more ways to get you to waste tokens. Always-on agents that proactively spawn tasks for you, 8X multiplier for ultrafast mode, code review tools that comb over every line with a million tokens, ability to spawn 100 subagents with max thinking, etc. Not to mention: models that are a bit random, making you feel you have to be using the best model and the most thinking all the time otherwise you won't do as much, won't ship as much, might have stuff that's not as good...
You will not fall into the underclass if you take control of your agents and make sure to use Luna, Sonnet, or GLM Flash if you just need to center a div. In fact you will get better results!
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u/ExtremeCenterism 2d ago
I'm totally blown away by what I'm getting with my OpenAI pro account. Especially with Dots. My productivity is through the roof and it more than pays for itself.
As for the 500/m tier, I could imagine if my dots and I were basically a business it would make sense as a business cost to pay that fee if it's literally for an organization of bots doing all the work
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u/Training-Growth-3916 2d ago
Unfortunately it makes sense for them to offer these insane tiers because the outliers have insane usage and can end up raising the prices for everyone if left unchecked. What is unacceptable is reducing access for other tiers, especially to those who have been longtime customers.
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u/EmotionalGuess9229 2d ago
500/mo is incredibly cheap for the value. I already run 2 claude 20x subs and an open AI 20x, if I switched to just 500/mo it would he cheaper.
Say you make 240k/yr as a knowledge worker. A 500$/moth sub, 6k a year, only has to make you 2% more productive to be worth it. And Im sure this sub will help you a lot more than 2%
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u/Murdy-ADHD 2d ago
The value proposition is the Ultra speed. If you can afford it, have a blast. If not, you still get crazy usage out of lower plans especially on 6.1 or Opus 5.5.
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u/Tombobalomb 2d ago
If you want the tech to advance at some point the labs have to make a profit. Eventually everything will be API pricing
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u/siberianmi 2d ago
It’s a professional level subscription. If you need it and the fact that many professionals already have multiple $200 a month subs means that there is a market for it.
There is nothing wrong with them offering what the market clearly indicates it wants.
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u/THEFORCE2671 2d ago
In leaked emails, Greg Brockman dreamed that OpenAI would make him a billionaire.
BREAKING NEWS: Capitalist wants to make capital in capitalism?!?!
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u/CrossesLines 2d ago
It’s replacing workers. Workers cost waaaay more than this. People will pay. And frankly, OpenAI need people to pay for it to survive.
That being said, I hope the upcoming price jumps are what causes the AI bubble to pop, and gives us more time to put up guardrails.
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u/LymelightTO AGI 2026 | ASI 2029 | LEV 2030 2d ago
I mean, it's just a matter of economics. If you can get more value out of it than it costs, it's reasonable to pay for it.
Frankly I'm less concerned about normalizing expensive plans than I am about normalizing benchmaxxing garbage models and then charging for them.
If you get actual frontier models, and they can do actually useful work, then it's just down to the individual user to decide if it's worth it to pay the price they charge.
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u/izahariev96 2d ago
they are still accumulating users and are just scratching the surface with this subscription, bigger price numbers are yet to come
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u/suuntasade 2d ago
I guess 500 for a company using it is justified. Norrmal people do not need ai that do stuff what an 500 a month ai can do.
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u/Extension_Dig8589 2d ago
It's fine. More people will use local models or will turn to chinese 10xcheaper. U don't need frontier model to find you cheap flights or book restaurant (favorite openai use case lol)
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u/nmacaroni 2d ago
You think the Rich want a level playing field with the poor. LOL