Yet another Hacker News

97 points spwa4 1 hour ago 77 comments

In case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week. Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less.

installiskeycon 1 hour ago | parent

KARIBIK

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

In hindsight, this makes more sense with the release of Astra. The $100/mo is now a more compelling upsell.

programmarchy 1 hour ago | parent

Yep, worked on me...

msh 1 hour ago | parent

I went another way and signed up for a opencode go subscription on the side.

ronsor 1 hour ago | parent

Opencode Go's value is pretty poor these days. It was better a month or two ago.

esafak 57 minutes ago | parent

What changed, increased quantization and reduced context windows?

quietsegfault 57 minutes ago | parent

Can you talk more about what changed in the last two months? I use open router for when I run out of limits, and I’ve done better than buying an additional sub for my uses. I thought about looking at a more niche player, but it’s not a priority for me yet.

ronsor 49 minutes ago | parent

First of all, it still has the 5 hour limits, which is what this thread is about and what I think what most in this thread want to avoid.

Second, the offerings are subject to change at random. They advertised $60 of usage for $10/month (knowing most users wouldn't reach that). This was consistently the case up until early August, when the per-model "usage multipliers" started taking over. Some models give $15 of usage per month, others $30, still others remain at $60, and apparently one at $100 now?[0] Either way, I don't want to expend the mental effort to track which model is the best deal for capability and usage.

Right now I use Hyper[1] for $20/month and give $100/month to OpenAI. Not OpenAI's biggest fan, but the value is good right now, and that's what matters.

[0] https://opencode.ai/docs/go/

[1] https://hyper.charm.land

watty 1 hour ago | parent

Session limits are obnoxious and make Codex much less useful for me. I tend to code in spurts when I find some time and the $20 weekly limit was reasonable for my side projects.

I'm now hitting the session limits which means I can either purchase another plan, upgrade, or move off of Codex.

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

The equivalent alternative is not "no hourly limits", it's simply less overall weekly allowance for Plus users, or higher prices overall. It's a way to balance a scarce resource, and maybe the least frustrating one?

People have a fair chance to learn resource management in 5 hour chunks, while not being limited to silly models, and burning through all tokens in the first hour of the week. Seems mostly good.

ignoramous 57 minutes ago | parent

> Seems mostly good

What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.

PaywallBuster 1 hour ago | parent

This allows users to pace their subscription usage to last the whole week.

I've had few weekends where I spend the full week credits over night then have nothing to do for a week

wrkronmiller 1 hour ago | parent

They could make this opt-in or opt-out

recursive 42 minutes ago | parent

It might be good to have at least two hobbies.

robotswantdata 1 hour ago | parent

This is very fair. Compared to Claude the Codex limits are much better and smarter model.

jeanmichelselli 1 hour ago | parent

Clearly, the prices and limitations will increase with time if they don't find an efficient way to perform training and inference of LLMs. It would be great to see those issues being seriously addressed and, eventually, being fixed for good. THAT would definitely make an important and practical difference. Not only economically but also scientifically.

parineum 58 minutes ago | parent

I always wonder where the people are who continually claim that this whole thing is already profitable are when prices are increased or services cut.

drob518 20 minutes ago | parent

I’ve not heard anyone say that the whole thing is profitable. Companies like Anthropic have said that inference is profitable, but I assume that’s only on a steady state basis, which nobody in the industry has ever reached at this point. As far as I know, everyone is still burning cash with data center buildouts and overall training costs.

almog 1 hour ago | parent

Previous discussion (from 13 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879

browningstreet 1 hour ago | parent

Codex pharming on X should take a dip…

estebarb 1 hour ago | parent

I dislike this approach. In my opinion it is much useful a 1x/2x billing based on hour like Deepseek does. Being unable to use it at the hours I need it makes me want to remove the service, not upgrading it.

Gurio 1 hour ago | parent

This is one of the reasons I’ve built a resident daemon on top a local CC/codex. 5h sessions is a [lazy] way to shift the scaling responsibility onto a user, so they are staying with us for a while

paxys 58 minutes ago | parent

People should realize by now that they aren't giving out thousands of dollars worth of compute in a $20 subscription out of the goodness of their hearts. The base level plans aren't meant for any kind of serious work beyond the equivalent of Google searches. At best treat it like a trial.

solenoid0937 49 minutes ago | parent

I hope everyone recognized the cheap tokens as a transparent ploy to gain more users before jacking up prices. This was obvious from day one.

brazukadev 45 minutes ago | parent

As long as there is no path to profitability going from subsidized to fully paid tokens we are making them lose money.

tehjoker 14 minutes ago | parent

This is not entirely true, you are costing them in the short run, but are growing your dependence on their product and feeding them training data.

Their goal is to create AGI and replace humans with something resembling the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel but more extreme.

password54321 45 minutes ago | parent

It is really about data. The endgame is not hoping devs give them money.

copperx 16 minutes ago | parent

More data isn't helping much, if Astra is any indication.

geraldwhen 42 minutes ago | parent

They won’t be able to. Open models exist and run on a Mac you can buy now or in October.

apparent 37 minutes ago | parent

The audience for this sort of thing is currently quite limited. It may grow more in the future, especially if prices get out of control, but for now, it's a relatively small subset of people.

howdareme9 33 minutes ago | parent

please point me to an open model, that matches astra even on low reasoning, and runs on a mac

esskay 29 minutes ago | parent

Sorry but this is a pretty delusional take. No, you cant run the same level or even close to that level of model on a mac, not even on a 512gb studio. You can run good models sure, but not models anywhere close to the capabilities of these ones yet, despite what idiots on Twitter keep spouting.

andybak 8 minutes ago | parent

The "run locally" thing is a red herring. The fact that anyone can be an inference providers and offer them as a service is what we need to focus on. If they are "good enough" then market forces will stop Anthropic/OpenAI from charging monopoly rents.

fny 40 minutes ago | parent

I hope everyone recognizes they aim to make you dependent on their intelligence rather than your own.

catchnear4321 37 minutes ago | parent

I reject your intelligence and substitute my own?

zulux 27 minutes ago | parent

There's an escape valve: I've had Claude stand-up AI-enabled features in my app, so we're much less dependent on Claude itself. The app uses cheap API calls to check code quality and run other "lessons learned" sweeps. Some of these become regular code in the end as well.

gruez 17 minutes ago | parent

But there's open models that are (pessimistically) 1 year behind? It's not like if openai decided to rugpull everyone, we'd be going back to writing code by hand and all the developers who forgot how to fizzbuzz would be screwed.

ghostly_s 12 minutes ago | parent

Open models still need compute.

flir 40 minutes ago | parent

Or more efficient models/faster hardware close the gap between here and profitability.

I wouldn't be surprised if every $10 you add to the subscription cost halves your audience.

skybrian 21 minutes ago | parent

Your cheap cynicism makes OpenAI's lower prices sound like a reason to avoid using them, but that's backwards! It's a better strategy to use them now while prices are low and switch later if necessary. Nobody knows who will have the best prices later, so better to decide later.

cj 17 minutes ago | parent

It’s good to be aware when you’re buying something that’s subsidized. No need to downplay the importance of awareness.

skybrian 11 minutes ago | parent

Aware of what, though? We don't actually know OpenAI's profit margins on inference. Do we need to know?

It's enough to know that the market is competitive and new models with better prices are released often. This means you should have a way to switch models.

madaxe_again 19 minutes ago | parent

Or to just give users enough usage to find categories in which it is useful for them.

I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.

kraftman 40 minutes ago | parent

Is it not due to the all the user data they are gathering?

worldsavior 31 minutes ago | parent

I thought it was always about us being the RL. We pay less because they use our usage to train their models.

add-sub-mul-div 17 minutes ago | parent

I can't believe people are letting themselves be taken for a ride so shortly after seeing what happened with streaming subscriptions.

reenorap 54 minutes ago | parent

How is 5 hrs being measured and over what time period?

colechristensen 51 minutes ago | parent

In all of them I've seen it's a window that starts when you haven't been using it in a while and begin work OR when your previous window expired. The window starts with a set number of tokens and cuts you off when they're used, it is fully reset at the end of the window (it's not a sliding window).

When you haven't used any tokens for an extended amount of time it reverts to the point where whenever you send your first token is when the window begins.

gowthamgts12 50 minutes ago | parent

when you send your first message, the timer will start.

CSMastermind 49 minutes ago | parent

Once they capature enough marketshare prices and restrictions are both going to skyrocket. The difference between the subscription usage and API pricing are stark.

KronisLV 43 minutes ago | parent

This would need to be a collusion across most of the providers (which I think is likely to happen) otherwise OpenAI would get ditched for Anthropic or vice versa, depending on who raises the prices more. If it happens across the board then enterprises that can use Chinese models won’t have that many options but to pay up.

johnnyApplePRNG 42 minutes ago | parent

That's the fever-dream that OpenAI et al is fraudulently marketing to their investors I suspect, yes.

jamesriso 41 minutes ago | parent

This is interesting to think about. There's so much competition among the frontier labs and from outside via open source it just doesn't seem obvious to me they could maintain elevated prices

pinkmuffinere 34 minutes ago | parent

Ya, setting aside any judgement about what's "right", this strategy doesn't seem profitable. There's no real moat between one model/provider to another, switching is relatively easy. I don't understand how this is supposed to work for them.

It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options

sidrag22 27 minutes ago | parent

just dont fall in love with goofy memory style features and its likely gonna be fairly easy to just plug and play whatever model for a ton of use cases.

I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.

drob518 34 minutes ago | parent

You’re going to get multiple tiers (as we already are). You’re always going to pay top dollar for frontier models, but you’re going to find things highly discounted if you’re willing to move off the frontier. See GLM 5.3 Flash, for instance.

Den_VR 29 minutes ago | parent

It should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives.

piloto_ciego 18 minutes ago | parent

It's just doomer nonsense to me.

On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.

Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.

Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.

Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.

Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.

Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.

I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.

"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?

satvikpendem 13 minutes ago | parent

Pascal's AI, I see. But yes, social media algorithms and the Internet in general have made people realize doomerism is what gets the clicks and views.

piloto_ciego 3 minutes ago | parent

I mean, kind of yeah? But like, there are already people working on the chips, there are already people designing the next hardware, etc. I'm sure we're going to get to a plateau in capability soon-ish? Exponentials are actually all sigmoids. But what does that look like? If the plateau in capability is 100s of times smarter than the average person (arguably we're already there in many many but not all domains) then in 10 years time last year's reasoning model etched into an ASIC or some crazy monstrosity built out of FPGAs but for LLMs is probably way more than enough for 99.999% of use cases?

But yeah, doomerism is the dominant narrative of the day here right now. There's a sort of eschatological poisoning that's happening presently. Nobody can even seem to imagine a world where things get better. It's crazy. Maybe it's because I recently went through a major illness, maybe it's because I hit my head one-to-many times along the way? But I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am now.

missingcolours 7 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't seem to have incentivized cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from being in that last category for years...

andybak 7 minutes ago | parent

Where's the moat? You can only truly "capture market share" if there's lock-in and no competition.

jonpurdy 37 minutes ago | parent

Controversial take but this works better for me than just the weekly limit. I have about 1-2 hours of sustained focus per 5 hour period so if I run out of tokens then I can take a break and start again in a few hours. Or just use the top ups that I’ve paid for in case I want to push through.

Having just the weekly limit meant I could blow through too much within the first couple of days. Fortunately, resets were raining down during that time.

(I know I could just vibe code a tracker that splits up my usage into arbitrary periods and lets me know when to take a break. Maybe if they remove the 5-hour limit again.)

indigodaddy 37 minutes ago | parent

What also sucks is your weekly reset does not also reset your 5 hourly. A bit like a slap in the face..

nullbio 27 minutes ago | parent

I think it's reasonable for the Plus plans to have this. If you're doing any serious work you should be on the Pro plan. If you're a casual user, 5 hours is more than plenty.

redox99 27 minutes ago | parent

5h limits are awful. It means it is literally unable to complete a large task.

A better approach if they want to balance the load is having higher usage or lower usage consumption at different times of day.

pkulak 24 minutes ago | parent

So use the api? You’re not getting a giant discount for nothing. The 5-hour limit is great for all my personal stuff.

redox99 16 minutes ago | parent

I use the $100 which currently doesn't have the 5h limit.

The 5h limit hurts the most on the $20 plan because the limit is already very small (5h is ~15% of your weekly).

nicce 21 minutes ago | parent

5h limit is gone with one prompt with Sol or Astra with high or higher thinking.

xqcgrek2 25 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI must be under a lot of pressure to make the books balanced. A bleak sign for Anthropic's IPO and the stock market.

pxx 24 minutes ago | parent

Wait, what? Hasn't this been the case for more than a week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879

ttul 20 minutes ago | parent

My goodness, the complaining... Just get all your devs a $200 ChatGPT Pro (20x) plan. Yes, you lose the "team" component, but you gain so much more. And what's $200 against the salary of a good developer? It's absolutely inconsequential, even in far cheaper non-US salary regimes.