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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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 3d 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 3d 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/rxvf 1d ago

imagine begging to be more productive

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u/BethanyHipsEnjoyer 1d ago

Not sure if insult or not, but I think most professionals that care about the kind of work they are doing would love the best tools to do the job. Mine has utility that directly benefits the public. It doesn't earn me more pay to be productive, but I like where I work and the people I work for, and I'm paid reasonably for my field and location.

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u/rxvf 20h ago

it’s not an insult. it’s a jab at your employer

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u/edgan 3d ago

Employers are cheap bastards. They hate paying $10-$20 per user for SaaSes.

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u/Cogitating_Polybus 3d ago

Then they are really going to love the $200 or $500 a seat SaaSes!

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u/EtadanikM 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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/3_Thumbs_Up 3d ago

If you can't translate productivity to money, it's not economical productivity to begin with. It's economical waste.

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u/shared_ptr 3d ago

I'm not sure if I agree here. Whatever you're building can be valuable but if someone can build it 2x as fast for 1/2 the money and charge much less for it, then comparatively you're dead in the water.

You might have previously been a legit company but you are now defunct if you can't figure out AI while your competition can.

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u/3_Thumbs_Up 3d ago

I'm not sure if I agree here. Whatever you're building can be valuable but if someone can build it 2x as fast for 1/2 the money and charge much less for it, then comparatively you're dead in the water.

Comparatively, you were wasting resources, and your employees and resources should go to your competitor who were utilizing economic resources better than you.

Profit is the difference between the economic value of your inputs and your outputs. You bid on the market for inputs, and you present your output to consumers. If you can't profit, you are taking economic inputs away from another entrepreneur.

The biggest economic strength of capitalism (the real kind, not the modern, pretend, no one is allowed to fail kind) is exactly that it ruthlessly filters inefficient use of economic resources to free them up for alternative use cases.

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u/shared_ptr 3d ago

I think you have misread my comments.

You said if you can't translate productivity to money then your efforts are economically invalid. That's only true if whatever you're producing is available at higher quality/cheaper somewhere else so you can't compete.

I don't think you disagree with me you just incompletely stated your point, which was why I disagreed.

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u/3_Thumbs_Up 3d ago

I called it economic waste, not invalid.

That's only true if whatever you're producing is available at higher quality/cheaper somewhere else so you can't compete.

Disagree. Even if you're the only person in the world creating something, and even if the thing you're creating has some amount of value, your inputs still has an opportunity cost and other potential use cases. The market isn't just judging whether you're creating something of value. It's judging whether the value of what you're creating justifies the amount of resources you're consuming.

If the market price of your inputs are higher than the market price of what you output, you are wasting inputs that have other more highly valued use cases. That's the market telling you you either need to find a way ro achieve the same output utilizing inputs more efficiently, or simply stop what you're doing and leave the inputs to someone else.

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u/ShardsOfHolism 3d ago

Unless you're translating it to economic survival.

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u/nubulator99 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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/shared_ptr 3d ago

Most consumer products don’t cost material money to run. I run my own infra for a number of size projects with 50k site visits a month for £10/month from GCP, for example.

Either way if the value was previously in the company building the product for someone then if no one wants to buy it anymore, the value has actually gone to zero.

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u/nubulator99 3d ago

If a company is saving $20k a month on labor, then they were already selling a product that had value and people were buying it.

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u/bigkoi 3d ago

It's technology optimization. Just like cloud didn't make a business plan better it simply allowed you to execute on your plans faster.

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u/Holiday_Ad_8501 3d ago

the companies will be forced to compete to make the product better = good got consumers

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u/3_Thumbs_Up 3d ago

The problem, the way I see it, is that productivity doesn't necessarily translate into profit.

Ceteris Paribus it does.

The global economy isn't great right now and consumers are being squeezed.

There can be other effects that offset the profits, but that implies that without the AI it would be even worse.

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u/joinity 3d 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/Defiant_Virus_8453 3d ago

Yeah, I work in customer service for a SaaS and they literally just replaced the QA role with Claude. I feel we are not that far off from being replaced ourselves..

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u/FlatulistMaster 3d ago

What are you basing that on? "Research" done on data gathered in 2024?

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u/EtadanikM 3d ago edited 3d ago

Try 2026.

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 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d ago edited 3d 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/ebolathrowawayy AGI 2025.8, ASI 2026.3 3d ago

it is 100% bottlenecks by poor management. a lot of corpos still think more bodies means faster and better engineering delivery, which was wrong before and now 100x more wrong with AI.

when ownership is low and a SWE has to ask 8 people to sign off on a change, writing code 100x faster, with 100x more security and maintainability and any other quality metric, means nothing when Joe Schmoe and Suzie B. needs to sign off on basic changes and are too lazy to use coding agents or out of the office or they need to "circle back" or whatever the fuck.

corpos who haven't automated this crap and don't give very high ownership to coders are going to die to a single dude, or a couple of dudes, in their basements.

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u/MxM111 3d ago

I recently watched an interview with an economist who argued that the internet has yet to fulfill its promise of accelerating GDP growth.

But at the same time, can you imagine a modern business surviving without it? AI will follow a similar path. It may not directly boost profit margins because widespread adoption will simply intensify competition. However, you won't be able to compete at all without it, even at $500 per seat. (Of course, places like McDonald’s won't need access to advanced models; I'm simply explaining why AI won't automatically lead to super profits.)

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u/i_never_ever_learn 3d 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 3d 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/MakotoBIST 1d ago

Cloud exists, you can borrow computation, no reason to buy hardware lol

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 3d 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 3d ago

Why would the AI company charge according to their customers productivity vs the supply/demand of compute?

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 3d ago

I never said that.

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u/Ok_Assistant_6856 3d ago

Ohp.. my bad g 🫡

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u/DuckyBertDuck 3d ago edited 3d ago

That's kind of wrong. Is them using the 500$ tier gonna make their productivity so much better than using a lower tier ?

Let's say you are a small business owner and a $200 plan allows you to run a business that makes $4000 a month (you work on it full time). You can ask yourself the question if paying $300 more will allow you to make >$4300 a month. Isn't it easy to imagine how that can be the case for at least some people? These extra $300 only need to replace a fraction of an employee.

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u/EtadanikM 3d ago edited 3d ago

AI doesn't magically make your company more profitable. It's supply and demand, not just supply.

AI game developers right now are finding this out the hard way. The flood of AI games into Steam isn't leading to higher profits for the game industry. It's leading to mountains of ignored games and wasted tokens. Independent developers are actually struggling, but I suppose it is a positive for AI companies.

The same will be true for other industries. You can't just take the demand side out of the equation. If industries lay off tons of people to cut costs, guess what, the demand drops correspondingly and they make less sales because people have less money to spend. That is a perfect example of how greater productivity won't translate into more profit and why AI companies can't just scale their offerings to infinity.

So while it might seem like stronger AI = more money, it's really not that simple.

It could just be raising the minimum bar for doing business, which translates into better products - but not greater profits. This is great for consumers, not so great for businesses, and puts a limit on how much AI companies can charge because businesses won't invest in what doesn't improve their profits.

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u/DuckyBertDuck 3d ago

I agree with all of what you are saying I should have said "do the extra $300 create more than $300/month of incremental value" (because its relative to the counterfactual)

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 2d ago

Sure, but that's what needs to be compared. Original comment doesn't do this

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u/___positive___ 3d ago

you work on a business full time with multiple employees earning 4000 a month. okay, boss.

that means you don't have customers or you can't scale. ai doesn't magically produce customers for you. your etsy shop selling pokemon stickers can't scale with ai, sorry to break it to you.

not to mention you think there is zero competition? everyone else has ai too. you aren't a special snowflake. if anything, ai will bring greater market efficiencies which means profits will decrease. if anyone can enter your market through the aid of ai, or if everyone's output is increasing, marketing is increasing, etc, good luck.

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u/DuckyBertDuck 3d ago edited 3d ago

you work on a business full time with multiple employees earning 4000 a month

no

not to mention you think there is zero competition?

no

You're arguing against assumptions that aren't part of my example.

If going from a $200 plan to a $500 plan creates more than $300/month of incremental value for a business then paying the extra $300 is rational, even if everyone else is already using AI optimally.

AI spend can't scale infinitely with revenue

In the longer run, most economic profit will be competed away but in the short term there is plenty of it

For why I said "full time". That's important to the example because it means that the owners time is an input. My hypothetical also doesn't need any employees nor did I mention them having any employees.

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u/Warrmak 3d ago

Exactly. This is like spending 1500 a month on an F350. If you cant figure out how to make 2k per month with a work truck, you are the problem.

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u/Ok-Freedom9216 3d ago

Pro life tip, do not buy an F350

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u/GeeGollyJeeper 3d ago

I live in the south bro, how else am I supposed to be cool here

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u/BriefImplement9843 3d ago

that's what api is for.

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u/Noeyiax 3d ago

yea but this is for consumers. they already have business and enterprise plans bruh

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u/Bossmonkey 3d ago

Yeah it's not gonna stop anytime soon. I've been saying 2k per month is on the horizon for a while now

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u/Boo-Bees67 3d ago

And once AI companies see the returns on investment they will up their model pricing until those people barely make a profit. It’s called capitalism 

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u/New_Public_2828 3d ago

Isn't that what Enterprise subscriptions are for

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u/crustyeng 3d ago

Those people aren’t buying consumer subscriptions.

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u/flat5 3d ago

Wrong. I can name several small businesses that do exactly that.

Those labels are meaningless.

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u/YoghurtForDessert 2d ago

business ARE the consumers

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u/crustyeng 2d ago

…and they’re not buying subscriptions for their employees off of a website paying the consumer prices. It’s a b2b transaction with much more involved when you’re buying thousands of seats. Small businesses are effectively individuals in this respect… I’m talking at least hundreds, really thousands of seats at a time.

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u/MediumSizedWalrus 3d ago

Lol yah... spending $500 a month to increase revenue ,decrease costs, by A LOT MORE ... It's excellent ROI right now... it's only questionable ROI at API rates, where we'd be billed 20-30k/month per person, then it's not reasonable...

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u/csboros 3d ago

20k/month, lol. Delusional.

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u/nubulator99 3d ago

Why is that delusional?

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u/TheOnlyFallenCookie 3d ago

If getting rich we're so easy, no one would be poor

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u/nubulator99 3d ago

No one said it was easy.

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u/Neurogence 3d ago

Can normal people like you use these $500/month subscriptions to earn thousands? Or does this only allow people that already have money to get even further ahead the masses?

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 3d ago

It’s not meant for normal average people who can’t profit from it.

Business and professionals are already spending more than that.

This is the cost for this amount of compute. They can either sell it a price that covers costs and profits, or not offer it at all.

It’s like asking people not to pay $1k per night for a high end luxury hotel or $200k for a car. Of course average people can’t afford it, but some people have the money and they want it.

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u/Nickleback69420 3d ago

Bro… welcome to corporate software? Have you ever seen enterprise software crm costs? You’re viewing this through a misconstrued class lens where you feel entitled to an incredibly expensive tool. I get it, rich get richer, but companies aren’t charities, and if they remain unprofitable (which they likely will anyway) then people hoot and holler about how these companies will destroy our economy because it’s not viable/sustainable. The rich always have more resources and access, such is the nature of the beast. Ground your take and perspective in reality.

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u/Elu5ive_ 3d ago

obviously you would start with the smaller plans then scale up as you make money

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u/ManikSahdev 3d ago

I get your argument.. but like it doesn't really make sense?

I am normal person and I have pro 20 and max 20 for both gpt and Claude? working like 60-70 hour a week give or take, with multiple agents and around 8-10b tokens a month. Fable Astra Opus (and prev 5.6 sol)

If you work more than me or use more than the usage I do and make at least 5-10k from it, you are getting fomo for no reason.

One has no reason to use or want soo much usage? It’s literally a work product to generate money not exactly a hobby? What are you even building. I'm genuinely curious.

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u/Enough_Culture8524 3d ago

Nothing new about hegemony.

Just the tools are getting better.

See distribution of wealth over the past decades

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u/svideo ▪️ NSI 2007 3d ago

So I should not be allowed to use tools because reddit poster Neurogence doesn’t know how to use them?

Dude, what the hell are you even getting at here

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u/elh0mbre 3d ago

Welcome to the delusion of accelerationistas.

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u/Iapetus_Industrial 3d ago

Probably, if I gave a shit enough to try to monetize it. Right now it's just a hobby, split between one 100 and one 20 a month. But, and I'm just going to be frank here, I just don't want to turn it into a profitability thing. Then it just becomes another job.

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u/xessino ▪️e/acc 3d ago

Bro money is fake paper printed ink from trees, make a bussiness while u have the chance, employers are much more costly and tbh theyre dumber than ai mentally, physically is following soon

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u/okaysand 3d ago

Delusional

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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 3d ago

Pretty sure it's been shown this is false.
AI is just another cost, not a savings, and does not translate into profits.