Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
In case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week. Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less.
In case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week. Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less.
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.
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.
As long as there is no path to profitability going from subsidized to fully paid tokens we are making them lose money.
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.
It is really about data. The endgame is not about hoping devs give them money.
More data isn't helping much, if Astra is any indication.
This is just you putting your head in the sand while you gradually automate your job.
I've spent my entire career trying to automate my job.
(I get what you're trying to say, I'm just finding the irony amusing).
What are they going to do with that data? Is it ads again?
You are about to get replaced.
That's happening anyways, they don't need more organic data for that.
Also, who cares? Such is the price of progress, I'm not selfish enough to hold humanity back because "muh job"
That's great. We are obviously both privileged enough to think that. Not so great for others.
They'll get through it. You don't just halt progress because the transition will be rough. We'd be pre-industrial if we thought like this.
Probably not, but I can channel my inner Scotty Fairno https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUbMs8Vipp5/
They won’t be able to. Open models exist and run on a Mac you can buy now or in October.
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.
please point me to an open model, that matches astra even on low reasoning, and runs on a mac
No problem, but you'll need to wait a few months
Why would it need to match Astra?
Software companies don't give up and fold because they can't hire one of the five best engineers in the world.
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.
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.
I hope everyone recognizes they aim to make you dependent on their intelligence rather than your own.
I reject your intelligence and substitute my own?
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.
Same. Claude "loves" writing tools to make checks deterministic so much that I actually have to pull it back sometimes and point out that some things need to keep using LLMs. But even then, I have it "farm out" a lot of things to scripts using dirt-cheap models for things I don't need a Sonnet or higher level model for as well. The proportion that runs on the SOTA models keeps dropping.
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.
Open models still need compute.
Open AI rents compute. It seems unlikely given the huge investments they have already spent that they can profitably match someone who is just selling GPU time.
Open weight models are way closer to frontiers than that
> we'd be going back to writing code by hand
Well, as as SWE who writes code by hand and has no intention to outsource their intelligence to any entity, I felt slightly offended by "back".
Are you a member of a team? Then you are the outsourced intelligence. Your manager is not writing everything by hand, they are outsourcing it to you. Just understand that may change (I mean I am already mentally prepared for it to be a thing of the past within years). If you are purely writing software for hobby/fun then disregard, nothing will stop you from doing that.
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.
That boils down to who the customers for ChatGPT really are. $10 isn't going to make a difference for those who already pay, because they are basically pro-consumers. OpenAI might deliver enterprise solutions for large companies, but those deals are besides the per month subscriptions on the website.
For ChatGPT I really only see two customer groups, pro-consumer and small and medium enterprise. The entry level are just going to use Google/Gemini for the most part, or some ad supported ChatGPT tier. There's no price low enough to make the entry level, average consumer pay for an AI service. These are people who will not pay for search, email and social media. They only pay for streaming because there's no way around it.
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.
It’s good to be aware when you’re buying something that’s subsidized. No need to downplay the importance of awareness.
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.
The entire market is subsided more than it is competitive. The market wouldn’t exist the same as it does today if it weren’t being propped up. Thats the point.
I remember the days when I had a $2000+ credit balance on Uber because I mastered their referral program. “Free” uber blacks for 2 years!
When you’re using free shit that you should probably be paying more for, it’s good to not fool yourself.
In the Uber example, the fact that Lyft also existed at the time didn’t matter to me as someone happily riding around the city in Uber Black for $0. Unfortunately Lyft’s referral program wasn’t so lucrative so I couldn’t switch…
How does this work with inference providers behind OpenRouter? Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?
Where can I sign up for a monthly subscription on OpenRouter instead of paying the real API price?
To the extent that the 3rd party inference resellers are a viable market because of Chinese/certain US AI labs (current) willingness to absorb substantial compute/R&D/data harvesting costs while releasing weights on permissive licensing terms for free, then yes, current pricing is distorted.
> Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?
Are you saying these companies are operating on anything resembling a sustainable business model?
I think not!
If OpenAI needs to impose 5 hour limits during a time where they are aggressively trying to grow market share, what do you think they (or whatever the winning provider is) will do in 5 years once they IPO and need to boost margins?
They won’t be as friendly with usage caps as they’re being now.
Aware that this is essentially a soon to be deprecated service. As any vendor you need to know the life expectancy of it, plus forecast/predict any pricing changes. You really do not want to become dependent. Even if competitors exist, there still some non trivial cost to switch
Aware that the rug will be pulled. The market runs at a loss
agree and underscores the idea that you should keep your setups portable between model providers by using external memory systems and connector gateways
Only if switching costs are low. If you are investing in the platform and integrating deeply, then planning to switch may not be a good plan.
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.
you’re using an LLM as your international accountant? And brag about it online? That’s definitely a choice
It was obvious indeed, but damn does it feel good to have ridden the May 25 - Aug. 26 gravy train.
Now, let's see how the Anthropic IPO goes.
I'm going to predict: soft, below first-trade price at 180d from IPO date.
Is it not due to the all the user data they are gathering?
I thought it was always about us being the RL. We pay less because they use our usage to train their models.
I can't believe people are letting themselves be taken for a ride so shortly after seeing what happened with streaming subscriptions.
Disagree, not for serious work if you're a developer aka requiring loads of iterations tool calls etc. But for other tasks it's relatively fine.
> 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.
I've said this countless times already; if OpenAI or Anthropic were serious about world domination they would offer an infinite $500 to $1000/month tier subscription. No limits; eat as much as you'd like buffet. Maybe limit concurrent connection (say 10 conns max in parallel) to limit abuse. This would actually allow regular users to run 24/7 agentic loops, massively speeding up deployment. Win win for everyone.
The business model works by over provisioning, which means you actually do want to cap the people who will attempt fully utilize the service.
Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.
The $100 plans are plenty for me to use nearly all day. I'm using between $1500-3000 worth of tokens a month via those plans.
I definitely see the pricing model. I can afford $100, maybe $200, but not $3000.
one word, localmodels
They must have realised by now what they are selling is addictive. It's pretty normal for drug dealers and the like to give people introductory prices then hike once dependence kicks in.
The same can be said of the $200 plan.
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.
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.
> Seems mostly good
What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.
The rules are not changing by chance. People want to use the new model. Rules are adjusted to better meet demand.
People want things to be better more than they want things to not change. That's a good thing!
Once they capature enough marketshare prices and restrictions are both going to skyrocket. The difference between the subscription usage and API pricing are stark.
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.
That's the fever-dream that OpenAI et al is fraudulently marketing to their investors I suspect, yes.
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
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
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.
Every project I have tends toward coding agents over time partly for this reason - if nothing else, I want have both control, visibility and portability over memory and a log of the reasoning that went into the current state of things.
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.
It should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives.
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?
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.
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.
Doesn't seem to have incentivized cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from being in that last category for years...
Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.
That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.
There is so much competition among frontier labs, but it is a competition to see who can burn the biggest pile of cash. Once your competitors flame out, they are gone, and you are free to raise prices. Think WalMart/Uber tactics.
Where's the moat? You can only truly "capture market share" if there's lock-in and no competition.
In hindsight, this makes more sense with the release of Astra. The $100/mo is now a more compelling upsell.
Yep, worked on me...
I went another way and signed up for a opencode go subscription on the side.
Opencode Go's value is pretty poor these days. It was better a month or two ago.
What changed, increased quantization and reduced context windows?
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.
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
What does Hyper give you that OpenCode doesn’t? Is it just the removal of the 5 hour limit? I looked at Hyper’s docs but it wasn’t clear exactly how the fine points work. Is it $20 for as much as you want of any model they support? They don’t say that but they don’t say no limits anywhere that I could find. Been using OpenRouter with API prices and choosing cheap models to get work done. It works but a $20 all you can eat provider with access to good models like Kimi 3 and GLM 5.3 who is not in china and doesn’t retain or train on data would be perfect for me.
Hyper gives $12.50 worth of usage every 24 hours, totaling $375 per month. It resets at the same time regardless of when you start, unlike the 5 hour limits on other providers. Yes, it's only $20/month. It's also insanely fast; I've never gotten 75+ tokens/sec on K3 from any other provider.
Okay, thanks. Yea, that’s a good deal as long as you’re satisfied with the models they offer. I didn’t see a listing of all the models but there was one screenshot that implied various open models (showed downrev versions of GLM, Kimi, etc., so I figured they supported the latest.
You can check https://hyper.charm.land/v1/models for the complete list.
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.
So use the api? You’re not getting a giant discount for nothing. The 5-hour limit is great for all my personal stuff.
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).
5h limit is gone with one prompt with Sol or Astra with high or higher thinking.
This is very fair. Compared to Claude the Codex limits are much better and smarter model.
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.
Sam, is that you?
Devs are already on an enterprise plan. I think the people complaining are the personal use folks
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.
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
Previous discussion (from 13 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
How is 5 hrs being measured and over what time period?
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.
Hm, it seems like it'd make sense to automate a script to send one small prompt at, say, 7 or 8am so that you get your reset around noon instead of having to wait until 5h or more into the workday.
I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary
Some third party harnesses allow you to do this, definitely makes sense.
when you send your first message, the timer will start.
it is a window that starts with usage and continues for five hours.
When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.
The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.
That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.
What also sucks is your weekly reset does not also reset your 5 hourly. A bit like a slap in the face..
Oh that's just sloppy of them.
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.
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.
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.
I think the people that are saying that mean that the inference is massively profitable. From what I've seen, the margins are between 50 and 90% on an API call. It's the training that's very, very expensive!
As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.
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.)
Wait, what? Hasn't this been the case for more than a week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
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.
OpenAI must be under a lot of pressure to make the books balanced. A bleak sign for Anthropic's IPO and the stock market.
Codex pharming on X should take a dip…
KARIBIK
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
They could make this opt-in or opt-out
It might be good to have at least two hobbies.