alt Hacker News“OpenAI's new Pro 500 plan offers OpenAI's highest usage allowance and comes with access to its new "Ultrafast" feature — it also costs $500 per month.
At the same time, OpenAI is also making its existing $200 Pro plan less appealing. In Codex and Work, $200 Pro subscribers will see their included usage decrease from 20x of what the company offers to Plus users, down to 10x of that same allowance. In ChatGPT, meanwhile, GPT-6 Pro message caps will decrease from 200 to 100 per week.”
https://www.engadget.com/2272106/openai-adds-dollar500-pro-s...
Yikes
Replies
Unfortunate that the Ultrafast is only available with the $500 subscription.
Tibo said that the existing $200 subscriptions keep the 20x factor for a while.
Ultrafast would have been nice with the temporary "Pro 400" plan.
I think that's by design - they're going to IPO soon so if they can get a significant percentage of users to switch from the $200 to the $500, they can 2.5x projected revenue.
This is pretty typical product positioning. You want to sell to both high-end and low-end users, so you offer products at a few price points. Then it turns out that that middle is a much better fit for most users. So you start making the middle a worse fit to push most of those users into the higher tiers.
Long term, this only works if you have a non-commodity, and if the higher tier is actually more profitable. We'll eventually learn whether both are true. For OpenAI right now, it's probably enough to just increase revenue, even if the higher tier is even less profitable.
At $500 per month, it's cheaper to just buy GPUs and use local models.
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Wow, canceling my sub. Lets see how Claude is doing these days.
I can justify $200/mo but more than double is not appealing to me.
OpenAI is deeply unprofitable, particularly on those pro plans.
The only way is for prices to go up. Way up.
They're really (finally?) starting to behave like a company bleeding money.
Our VC-backed subscription days are numbered