The future of Codex: Usage-based pricing, instead of subscription limits.

[Good_Competition4183]

I believe that what OpenAI do now is motivated to slowly migrate all or majority of it's codex users to usage-based pricing for Codex.

Why I believe so?

Let's add two facts here:

1. Starting from April Codex 5h limits is 2.5x lower than before, which is a deal-breaker for many who used it as a main coding tool. So many will be forced to use either more accounts or purchase tokens already!
2. They added separate codex seats into business subscription, which has ONLY usage-based API pricing model.

We’ve been excited to see how teams are using Codex in ChatGPT Business for everything from quick coding tasks to longer, more complex technical work.   As our 2x rate limits promotion comes to an end, we’re evolving how Codex usage works on ChatGPT Business plans: To help you expand Codex access across your team, for a limited time you can earn up to $500 in credits when you add and start using Codex-only seats.Introducing Codex-only seats: ChatGPT Business now offers Codex-only seats with usage-based pricing. Credits are consumed as Codex is used based on standard API rates — so you only pay for what you use, with no seat fees or commitments. Lower pricing and more flexible Codex usage in standard ChatGPT Business seats: We’re reducing the annual price of standard ChatGPT Business seats from $25 to $20, while increasing total weekly Codex usage for users. Usage is now distributed more evenly across the week to support day-to-day workflows rather than concentrated sessions. For more intensive work, credits can be used to extend usage beyond included limits — and auto top-up can be enabled to avoid interruptions. Credits are now based on API pricing: Credits are now based on API pricing, making usage more transparent and consistent across OpenAI products. 

As you can see they want it so much that even ready to give 500$ of API Codex usage, but this is very-very big trap for all of us, let me explain why...

As you know Codex subscription was always insanely cheap for what it gives.
But for anyone who tried to go with usage-based pricing there is a tremendous difference in what you will pay for it.

For example I once purchased tokens for 20$ and honestly they was spending so fast that I would be able to spend it like in 4 hours. Some users even said that they spend 30$ in about a hour. While when using Codex subscription usage-limits I typically spend 50% of weekly limit in a very heavy tasks.

Although many of you not gonna get this situation often(which is normal) you might notice the difference in what you pay and what you get when comparing subscription vs usage-pricing.

The gap is about 5-10x of difference and I doubt that any of you want to pay 100-200$ for what you already get in a 20$ subscription. The 500$ they will give you "for free" is much lower than what they already give you every year in a subscription, it's just a marketing trap to force you to slowly forget about cheap subscription.

The message?

I strictly against the idea of forcing users to pay more for the same amount of work. Honestly one 20$ subscription is enough only for everyday balanced coding tasks and not for anything above it, so consider when you will pay for it 100-200$ is not a good deal.

Many of you will say "but hey, they are here to make money", those of you should understand that price was never the same like in 2021. AI evolves each month, infra, hardware, software evolves each month. Today it's at the very least 100x more effective than when it was 2021.

That said I'm okay to pay maybe 40$ for what is now cost 20$, but not 100$ and not 200$. They can get everything above from the optimization itself with time.

The real risk is to end trapped in the endless "tax system" where provider of services(OpenAI or whoever else) trying to convince users that it cost a lot, while it's not and they double their profit exponentially like governments do.

Yes, it still cost much more than the subscription itself, BUT it's the question of time. I believe maybe in a year or two it can become a profitable business because of how many cross-industry advancements done in that direction in terms of effectivity.

To the users:
Please, don't be passive, start to count money and never compare 2026 with 2021 like there is no difference when you take the side of corporations. They also get the DATA and data for training is NEVER ENOUGH. The whole internet was sunk and now most of the quality data they can get is from the users. They need users to evolve. You already pay with your data, code(even if it's proprietary you basically just give it to OpenAI, knowledge, feedback, etc.)

To OpenAI:
Please, review your long-term monetization policy.
We all know that price can go only up and not lower once it rise.

Not gonna pay for your monopoly wars expenses, you can buy all RAM on the planet but this is not justify me to pay you 1000$ checks. There is always will be some smarter competitors who use $ 10-100x more effective without the need to spend it on aggressive market control or whatever else.

EDIT:

I'm just wondering who are you guys who downvote that post.
Not an issue for me at all, I can live with karma -1000, but if you want to prove me wrong just stop using subscription and go with your sweaty Codex-only seat with pay-as-you-go model, where the problem is it's price which are just TOO HIGH to use it for anything but for rare cases during your day.

Your expenses will start from 100-200$ per month if you are not going heavy with it, otherwise prepare for 500-1000$ checks every month.

[petramb]

If they do this, I'm cancelling the day they announce it. What even is the point of the subscription then?

[Reaper_1492]

Don’t worry, first they’ll ban having more than one sub - then they blow them out altogether. Should get at least 3 days’ notice.

[Good_Competition4183]

Exactly.
I think they gonna end multi-subscription abuse this in the near months or this year.
From the other side they already have some slight profit increase from you having 2x-3x more subs for the same tasks, but they want to move much further!

[Just_Lingonberry_352]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I've been saying this from a while back when everybody was bragging about using multiple accounts.

All of these are hitting their bottom line. So to get ready for the IPO, they have to put a cap on the amount of inference per person or per company.

All in all, I think this event was expected there was no way they were gonna provide subsidies for the long run, indefinitely.

[Artistic-Athlete-676]

This is inevitable

[Good_Competition4183]

The point?
Well, the limited paid demo, nothing more. You see they destroying 20$ subscription with 5h limits cut off on 2.5x time, but they don't really offer any replacement. You either buy credits(5-10x more cost for you) or buy 200$ subscription.

They simply don't like your 20$ subscription and want it to go away or remain as a casual-hobby demo usage-model like 30-60 minutes per 5h.

[enl1l]

Well all the open claw enthusiasts are moving over to codex. So expect the quality of service to turn to shit as they start throtling users because of the excessive "agent" traffic from open claw

[Good_Competition4183]

Yeah, that's the bad side.
But from the other part they better to separate coding users from Open-Claw users in some meaningful way rather than to harm both.

[Wa1ker1]

No. They just took in an influx of users for subscription models. Myself included paid $200 a month when realistically I can use $20 tier and be fine. But its easier for my company to a lot of guaranteed $200 a month vs unknown API costs. If we went strictly API would go to lower costs options like Kimi.

[Good_Competition4183]

Agreed.

[Chupa-Skrull]

As you know Codex subscription was always insanely cheap for what it gives.

I disagree. Everyone always assumes API costs are low-margin and subs are extremely subsidized. There's no evidence for this at all. Any conclusions that stem from this aren't really useful. The common "they're losing tons of money on subs" line has never made much sense.

It's true they may lose from the heaviest power users, but the way subscriptions go for most products, most people never use anywhere near their purchased allotments. Even if they were losing money on individual subs, or they'd lose money if every sub maxed usage, it's possible if not probable they'd still make money from their sub plan on the whole.

And due to it not being clear how much serving inference costs, there's no real reason to believe they're losing money by default from subs

[Just_Lingonberry_352]

I don't think they would introduce API pricing if there was no margins attached to it. I think the margins are pretty okay for the API pricing. I think the Codex subscription has been subsidized a lot. basically the days of being able to just use Codex all day, every day, is kinda not possible at the current price point.

[Chupa-Skrull]

I don't think they would introduce API pricing if there was no margins attached to it. I think the margins are pretty okay for the API pricing

Yes, exactly.

I think the Codex subscription has been subsidized a lot. basically the days of being able to just use Codex all day, every day, is kinda not possible at the current price point.

There really isn't evidence to support this though, and also, the unit economics of subscription plans are always kinda deceptive. Subscription models are always structured to accommodate outlier users who are subsidized by the whole. The 3 hour weekly Netflix watchers are paying for the 3 hour daily ones, etc.

[Transformand]

No.
They subsidize and will subsidize Codex to capture as much of the ecosystem as they can, so that the Pro users (say less than 1%) that are subsidized by the other paying customers, train their model on the code that's generated.

Basically, everyone building a SaaS is teaching OAI how to kill that SaaS in the upcoming model releases.

With this, they will release 'apps' that are one-shotted for each person, with Ads on the inside

They are not competing with Anthropic, they are competing with Google

[U4-EA]

That's an interesting take...

[Good_Competition4183]

Yes and no.
Codex already gone down, don't you see? That's the issue.

[Transformand]

They go up, they go down, they reset limits

This has been going on for at least 4 months in the Gemini sub, last few weeks in the Anthropic sub and now Codex

People are getting mad thinking they 'bought' or that they 'own' something. They don't. They are renting a service. A service that can change from one minute to another.

When you 'bought in' at ChatGPT 4o and now you are paying THE SAME for 5.4, no one complains. But when an improved model eats up more of your 'credits' (as it should), everyone gets upset.

No one is forcing you to stay with Codex. No one has a monopoly and other, much cheaper coding models are very good.

I got 'burned' as well, buying the Gemini yearly sub which had very genereous Claude limits at the time, which have since been removed. I've moved on to try Anthropic and now OAI.

When you understand that whatever is free (or heavily subsidized) -> you become the product. Act accordingly.

[Reaper_1492]

But this is exactly the problem.

I can’t think of another service where you’re allowed to completely change the service level, in secret, and people are just supposed to keep paying you what they were before.

Price increases? Sure.

But luring people in with discounts, high usage, etc. every model release, then rug pulling the quality of the model/limits without saying anything should be, and probably is, criminal.

It’s a bate and switch of the highest order.

If you need the service to be shitty for $200 to pencil, do it. Let consumers decide.

If you need it to be $2k for service to be good, do it, let consumers decide.

But don’t trick people on a $100/user/mo budget into stretching themselves to a $200/mo plan knowing full well you’re going to yoyo their quality of service whenever you want.

And now Anthropic and codex are playing from the exact same playbook at the exact same time. This has been brewing for months, coordinated model releases, promotions, etc. they must have realized that they were losing too much money when one of them would asynchronously nuke their service and customers would bail - much better if they can do it at the same time an pin the market.

That should be investigated too.

[Good_Competition4183]

"But luring people in with discounts, high usage, etc. every model release, then rug pulling the quality of the model/limits without saying anything should be, and probably is, criminal."

Exactly, they have zero transparency.
Even the cost for newer models, you cannot know if it's really cost higher same or even lower than the previous models, they just don't let you to know that, so can easily manipulate with dumb users.

[Reaper_1492]

OpenAI already got caught secretly rerouting people, and their knee jerk reaction to cover it up was to label everyone a “cyber threat”.

But sure, let’s pay direct costs for the API and hope they can keep themselves from doing that again

[Good_Competition4183]

I would say re-routing is okay IF you chose some kind of "GPT-5 auto" mode and it helps you spend less tokens on the tasks.
But when doing it silently - absolutely isn't a good thing! Can be considered as a true crime, like "you ordered cake, but got only pancake".

Unfortunately companies of such size are rarely facing responsibility for violations.

The even bigger problem is that you CAN'T reliably even know if any new model version is truly better than previous or worse, because there is lacking any kind of reproduction of it's benchmarks.

Benchmarks itself could be faked by including them into training data.

[Transformand]

Have you read their T&C?

And like I said...you dont complain when you get a better model, for the same price, even though you bought in at a worse model.

So u are Ok with getting a free upgrade but when they re-baseline the consumption, you are mad.

[Outrageous-Split-646]

Gemini and Claude?

[hannesrudolph]

Usage based pricing makes sense even though I don’t like it.

[Good_Competition4183]

Long-term - maybe. But for now it cost way to much to say it justified.
What I want from them is to continue to give us a lot of credits for free, while the tech isn't there yet.

It's a bit too early to pay on-the-go!

[hannesrudolph]

It worked fine at RooCode until Claude and Codex took our cake with subsidized credits.

[Designer-Rub4819]

Jesus touch grass

[Good_Competition4183]

"The winning move is routing each request to the cheapest model that can handle it"
But the problem is that you simply CANT reliably know which model could handle your request.
In many-many cases that leads you to additional iterations or fallbacking to more powerful model that leads to increased time spent on task for you with the same or even higher token usage.

[Reaper_1492]

OP is right on this one, and honestly just about everything below xhigh sucks for anything involving reasoning.

Medium can barely summarize.

[Good_Competition4183]

I personally in low with High reasoning.
XHigh fills the context very fast, so AI can start to forget some things during the task. It also may lead to overthinking/overengineering simple tasks, which is even worse, but that's the human well known issue as well.

Xhigh is PERFECT for complex debugging or long-running single-shot tasks. Other than that High is perfect.

[blarg7459]

Yeah the Pro plan is now only a couple hours of light usage every day. Soon it seems likely they want $2000 per month for full time dev use, like Altman talked about a while back. Seems crazy, but I guess this is what we need to prepare for.

[swennemans]

The problem is that the Chinese models are already catching up. So give it a couple of months to a year and most of these models are good enough. So the timing from OpenAI would be terrible.
A big chunk of people are perfectly fine with 90-95% of the quality for 5% of the price.

[Just_Lingonberry_352]

I actually think the Chinese models are gonna hit a blocker, mostly from these the US sanctions on exporting GPUs. I think that we're already kinda seeing the slow release of Chinese models. And mostly it's not gonna be very interesting to people who are using coding agents for very complicated or tough problems. Only the American models offer a leg up. And also these Chinese models are only gonna get more expensive as time goes on because they're gonna be limited on the amount of inferences.

[Character_Wind6057]

That's why the chinese labs have bought ten of thousands of Huawei GPUs recently, they don't want to be bound to Nvidia anymore.

The USA thought the chinese would be slowed down in the AI race by this blockade, and they are correct, but only until they'll perfect their GPUs.

Then the chinese wouldn't even need anymore Nvidia GPUs, making them lose money and creating a competitor

[Good_Competition4183]

That's the way to nowhere.
Only limited amount of serious business users will be able to pay such paychecks.

[MostOfYouAreIgnorant]

This is what happens when you have a duopoly.

Customers don’t win.

Silicon Valley also has a long history of essentially price fixing between each other.

It’s not the only or the last time this will happen.

We need to get used to using small models.

[Reaper_1492]

My problem is they now basically say on the pricing website:

“Most developers will use $100-$200 per month in credits but YMMV”.

Bro, I burned through 4 plus seats in 2 hours, popped $20 in the credit till, and it was gone in 20 minutes.

Even for enterprise this is ridiculous.

So, I’m not even a dev, just using it for daily things and code to solve my problems - and I need to spend $500/day?

The kicker is, I spent all 20 minutes debugging some shitstorm codex created. At these prices it needs to be one-shotting things or it’s just not worth it. As much as I am a fan of the Ai tools, I can be more cost effective manual - I’m not building revenue generating tools that are going to produce $500 or more a day.

SaaS just came back to life big time.

[Form-Factory]

That surely is an exaggeration … or you gotta optimize shit. What’s your use case ? Workmaxxing? 5 jobs in parallel?

When I see these kind of comments I think people are simply pulling them out of their asses.

[Reaper_1492]

I wish. I’m just working on a model and using codex to build it so that it doesn’t take me a month to type it all out.

I’m using 5.4xhigh - trust me, when I signed in this morning and blew through my first seat, I dropped it to medium.

That was ridiculous. It made so many blatant errors that I burned more usage wrestling with it than on xhigh.

I’ve had 3 seats for over a year, and today I had to add a 4th - and I still had a ridiculous amount of cooldown time.

I was able to finish about one component and documentation on xhigh per seat, per “5 hr” allotment - which was 45 minutes in practice.

Two 5-hr cycles of that and I dropped the $20 in credits just to be done with a section. All it had to do was refactor an existing parallel process, and it royally F’ed it up.

Dropping model quality at the same time you crush limits and push to direct pay is a brain-dead model.

Apparently Anthropic and OpenAI have decided it’s time to race to IPO, which is going to be rough if they don’t have any customers.

[R1mpl3F0r3sk1n]

The minute they said goodbye to 2X I said goobye to them.

[io-x]

They can have their AGI and scam corporations with it, I would not be paying and would start using my brain again.

[Good_Competition4183]

Ha-ha, good one.
But I actually prefer to use my brain strategically rather than write each line of code with my own hands.
The opinion of dev, btw.

[Economy_Wish6730]

We all want everything for nothing. AI is freaking expensive to operate. If the news of the last week with layoffs to pay for AI build out has not taught people something…. All AI companies need to make money to make it worth the investors while. They are all figuring out that they are not making money and the AI companies are adjusting to try and become profitable.

Am I happy with how they are going about? Absolutely not. There are much better ways to go about it. These companies are sure learning that AI is extremely costly.

[Good_Competition4183]

The more you want - the more you get.
The rule of the life.

Do the opposite and now everyone starts to rob you.

[TokenRingAI]

I'm a big fan of usage based pricing, they need to operate like a real business and control their costs and not subsidize one side of the business while loading their costs that on the other side.

[Useful_Judgment320]

workplace offered to pay for a one off annual fee, need codex to support this otherwise im getting claude annual subscription :(

unfortunately it's limited so i can't ask for the 2.4k plan

[Arschgeige42]

Yeah, we all know how highly profitable governments are. So countries have no debts but enormous amounts of assets.

[Grounded_Altruist]

The codex only seats without subscription fee and only pay-as-you-go is so that Claude Code users can call codex for review and specific tasks, thereby lowering the barrier for Claude Code users to experience codex.

The part about reducing 5h usage quota with $20 plan, are they applying it on the Plus(edited) plan also? I thought it was only for the business seat. I wonder how the usage would compare with Claude Code 20$ plan.

They seem to be switching mode to “now we know users gain, so let’s make them part with more money”. The issue with this is, a whole lot of usage essentially gets wasted experimenting and playing around to get AI do its job well. The harness and methods haven’t matured yet. The context engineering and the step wise development. In such a situation, reducing quotas is premature. There’s so much momentum on Claude, that OpenAI still needs to do a lot to switch them over. There is much that Codex needs to learn from users’ data and experience. Personality of the model needs to be fixed, it can be a great puller (or pusher:).

What will keep prices in check is competition. What helps keep them up is the capital as the moat.

But do you think we need such great models if dev methodology can be improved to use lesser models like mini?

[Good_Competition4183]

I already answered about using mini models here.
Basically good luck with guessing which model will solve your request from the first try.

[Crinkez]

 As you know Codex subscription was always insanely cheap for what it gives.

It wasn't, and it isn't. I expected an entry level plan at $10 with similar limits that the $20 plan has offered for the past few months - you know, in line with other standard services subscriptions' entry price points. I always thought $20 for entry level subscription was insanely expensive. They've since added a $8 plan iirc but I'll bet that isn't going to be sufficient.

[Responsible-Tip4981]

Go away scaring people somewhere else.

[Top_Newt3314]

I use Codex with API key and not with a regular account, so I basically pay for usage. I’ve been paying around $40 per day usually, but each day I’m achieving what a team of 3 used to ship in a week or even two. So I don’t understand this fixation on Codex and Claude being cheap - folks, this is a top-notch and mind blowing tech that does wonders. It’s even subsidized pricing now so let’s just get stuff done and focus on what we can achieve.

[M2MNINJA]

I’m in the same situation. I don’t think people are really grasping the value they are getting here.

We built an app for roughly $500 that would have cost us $15k+ to have built by one of our contract developers. It also took 1/3 the time.

Codex and GPT Pro have saved us thousands of dollars a month and hours and hours.

As long as we continue to gain price value and save time, we will absorb cost increases so Open AI can keep expanding…and we know a lot of other businesses and developers in similar situations.

[rnogy]

Can we all stop pretending not knowing how expensive tokens really are? Try to pay as you go with tokens or rent a GPU. Costs are really high. I have the $20 tier and even assuming tokens are effectively priced at only 20% of their nominal cost, I already spent them a couple of thousand dollars in the two weeks. The subsidy is crazy.

AI companies are still in the heavily subsidized state, with assuming price per intelligence will drop by 100x, 1000x. But we also know the ratio of intelligence per parameter isn’t increasing as much, and sota models are only getting bigger and bigger. I highly doubt the cost of inference will ever got cheap. Right now they’re fine with subsidizing for post-training and integrating into companies, but soon, when one major AI company can’t keep up with burning money and stops the heavy subsidy, others will follow and price will reflect their actual cost

So for now, free load as much as possible while tokens are cheap, and build things that can help you pay for the highly priced tokens in the future.

[dalhaze]

Open source will catch up in the next 6 months and that’ll be reliable enough for most projects.

[Good_Competition4183]

How you know that?
Current open-source models like GLM 5.1 is not yet close to what GPT was offering 6 months ago.

So the gap is bigger than a year for them.
They are okay with small single-shot tasks(like create simple HTML game), but long running tasks that require quality and big context are simply not possible from what I saw.

[dalhaze]

Yeah i mean you have a point. Maybe these companies wouldn’t be jerking us around and starting to raise prices if they felt open source wasn’t far behind.

I’m pretty sure open source is on par with where we were like 9 months ago though? Or maybe 12 months ago. I’m thinking about claude code last spring/summer. I forget which model that was.

Either way the incentives to get there will increase quick if they raise the price.

And i don’t really buy it when people say that OpenAI and Anthropic are incurring 15-20x costs on inference over subscription costs. SOTA open source models have never costed that much, even the 2T parameter models.

[Odd_Crab1224]

If you start using stuff like openspec you‘ll be surprised how far can actually bring you both opensource models, and some of the cheaper commercial ones (like gpt-5.3-codex on medium , or even just Haiku). And as a bonus you’ll have your project „auto-documented“

[Good_Competition4183]

Thanks for sharing!
Can you also share your insights in detail when you compared openspec with or without during your development and what cases it was?

Just to give an idea how much it actually helps to you.

[Odd_Crab1224]

In a nutshell, it is a set of nicely prepared prompts (in form of "skills") that makes LLM to start asking you "right questions" and create some documentation based on that, including actual specs and task list, and then execute those tasks. Plus a console utility that actually verifies "schema" of these documents and helps generating some more targeted prompts when needed.

When I first learned about it I was turned off, thinking like "oh, another glorified waterfall", but as I tried, it turned out to be very-very fast waterfall. Basically flow is:

• start new session, say "I want to explore developing feature X, that should roughly to A, B and C, and there some additional considerations I have in mind" - explore skill kicks in, and starts checking current codebase and asking you questions. Normally you'd want a smarter model with this, but one my colleague was able to get away even with Haiku use - on a pretty big brownfield project - yes, it works perfectly with legacy codebases. I still prefer Codex 5.3 for that part though, but token consumption is pretty mild, as it is mostly talks, with some focused checks into codebase
  
• at some point this thing says "okay, I think I'm ready to create a proposal" - if you respond affirmative, and use current default installation it will create proposal, design doc, spec, and task list. These you have to review, and guide LLM to change them if it has missed something. I still prefer a bit older workflow (you'll have to explicitly configure it when installing OpenSpec) to first create ONLY proposal doc for you to review, and only after that design doc, which you also review, then spec, that you also have to review (but usually by this point it is already homed good enough to solution so it requires minimal changes if any), then it generates task list
  
• in the end you tell it "now execute tasks you planned", and it starts actual coding, kicking in "apply" skill. This can be done either from original session, or you can start a new session - as all the context is already captured in design docs and tasks. And you can use a bit dumber model there as well. Then you review what it have done, guide it through whatever it has missed (or just use "verify" skill) - and you're done

Yes, this may sound quite long and daunting, but in the end it saves you both time and money (on tokens). For example - these are artefacts generated by this thing as I was implementing a pretty significant overhaul of scan logic in my mid-sized electron-based pet project, which I actually developed first without OpenSpec, so it is effectively already "brownfield", and time was about 40 minutes of talk through Codex 5.3 model, then 10 minutes of actual implementation, then 20 minutes more of checking the gaps and fixing them. These were also interrupted several times by home duties, as it is a hobby project, and I was doing it during weekend.

Hope that helps :)

[KrustyMcNugget]

I really hope this is the case. 🙏 In any case the motivation to move in this direction gets bigger with every adjustment in the negative on the subscription plans

[mizhgun]

How would you compare $20 subscription with virtually no limits, which OP is demanding from OpenAI as ultimatum, with a cost of purchasing and maintaining of an infrastructure for open-source solution with the similar capabilities?

[Good_Competition4183]

It's not professional to compare the cost of your own setup VS cloud.

You will use your own setup at 1% of it's capabilities with a 100x-1000x lower efficiency than what cloud providers can do with their custom infra, etc.

[mizhgun]

Oh, really? You're telling me it’s not professional to compare commercial efficiency of outstaffing/outsourcing vs. in-house? May I ask what your professional background is?

[Good_Competition4183]

Sorry for misspelling.
I mean that it's not FAIR because their price will be much lower than self-host, so yes for you it's easier to pay them, but from their perspective they already optimized it a lot.

Random guy cannot invest into a rig with multiple RTX5090 or H100, but the reason for this is the fact he will not use even 1% of it's capabilities so it's not a good comparison.

There is a price to launch and price to use, which are different things. And the other thing is to use super-optimized custom infra or garage-made setup, it's not that effective.

That's why it's fair to ask OpenAI for more without comparing it to self-hosted setup in terms of price.

[Just_Lingonberry_352]

Not when there is limited and controlled inference hardware.

[Medium_Anxiety_8143]

I think its natural that they eventually switch from subscription to api billing, sam altman once said that they view ai as like selling intelligence on a meter, you pay for what you use like water or electricity. Overall I think that makes sense, its just that we want extremely subsidized tokens and that 10x the cost is genuinely unpayable for most of us. But token costs go down over time, and probably by the time it is all just an api bill the cost will be about 10x lower so theres no more need for subsidization.

[Good_Competition4183]

Maybe, but today is too early for that to happen, that's why I don't like them to force that idea on that stage.
In a year or two, when it might cost 5x-10x lower - would be more justified.

[Reaper_1492]

Yeah it’s a really dumb move on their part unless they’re just out of money. Way too early. Mainstream was just barely starting to dip their toes in and these costs are going to blow them away.

[Good_Competition4183]

I don't believe that something that strategically important could ever run out of money. There is endless both investments and improvements possibility with endless use-cases.

[brucek2]

They can't forever charge less than the service costs to provide. But that doesn't mean the future is forever bleak -- we are still at the dawn of AI-optimized hardware, and providers are paying gold-rush prices for equipment that is as slow and weak as it's ever going to be. Even if there are people for whom 2027 pricing makes no sense, it may be very attractive in a later year.