ChatGPT Pro 500

133

pprodigycorp about 2 hours ago 123 commentsRead Article on help.openai.com

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⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

72% Positive

Analyzed from 2812 words in the discussion.

Discussion (123 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Lalabadie•about 2 hours ago

Am I just out of touch with our times if I think hand-wavey usage limits on a 500$ subscription is crazy?

rafram•about 2 hours ago

It filter to people/organizations who have a hand-wavey relationship with $500.

Xcelerate•about 1 hour ago

I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.

datsci_est_2015•24 minutes ago

What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…

Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math

sillyfluke•24 minutes ago

Well, that was fun while it lasted:)

FrinkleFrankle•43 minutes ago

Fuck, that's smart. Thank you for the idea.

dpweb•about 1 hour ago

Usage is sus but 500 minus tax write off to even a one person business that makes 100-500k yr. not crazy at all - kinda expected.

Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.

kgwgk•43 minutes ago

  Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
  Jerry:        How is it a write-off?
  Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
  Jerry:        Write it off what?
  Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
  Jerry:        You don't even know what a write-off is. 
  Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
  Jerry:        No, I don't.
  Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

avgDev•38 minutes ago

I've talked to VP at my company and we both agreed $1000 for the time saved, is still 'worth it'.

Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.

I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.

chaostheory•about 1 hour ago

You can also right off actual $6000 hardware

FrinkleFrankle•41 minutes ago

I'd rather use the fancy models while absurd valuations are subsidising them and then pick up a couple grand worth of their old hardware in a few years when they're eol.

vcf•43 minutes ago

Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.

rebolek•31 minutes ago

I think that 100$ subscription is expensive but I'm just European peasant developer, not SF area oligarch.

boredatoms•about 2 hours ago

Im surprised some countries dont have consumer protection laws that would force them to be more explicit/accurate

jstummbillig•about 2 hours ago

How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.

MisterMunchkin•about 1 hour ago

Very easily, they do it for their API. You just set a limit in tokens.

schaefer•about 2 hours ago

but to do accurate billing, they would have to tell us when our usage triggers a guard rail and causes our query to be rerouted or denied.

And if they do that accurately, there's no stopping someone from mapping the guard rails.

Clearly that outcome is more uncomfortable than what we have now, which is enough people seem to be okay with vague billing.

ASalazarMX•about 1 hour ago

First, I wouldn't put it past OpenAI to charge even if your prompt triggered the guardrails, transferring responsibility is their style.

Second, how does vague billing prevent someone from mapping the "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" style of responses to map the guardrails?

cousinbryce•about 1 hour ago

Move fast and bill things

RandomGerm4n•about 1 hour ago

or they could simply remove the annoying guardrails

Razengan•about 1 hour ago

Maybe they're trying to milk as much as they can before open-weight models cause the prices to come crashing down?

a851c8a96264c•about 2 hours ago

Yes, you are. All of this was obvious from the start. The prices will go up way more soon (tm)

paul7986•about 1 hour ago

As a consumer paying $20 now to chatGPT where i hit those gauntlet usage messages then using Muse a lot and not receiving any such messages. Im questioning my $20 a month GPT subscription and my $5 a month Gemini (Google has enough money as Meta to make it free) subscription.

Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!

Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.

abirch•25 minutes ago

If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. It's like gmail is free, but Google is harvesting all of my data to sell me ads. Meta is doing the same with Muse.

CSMastermind•about 2 hours ago

Yeah it's wild that they don't outright state the specific usage limits.

Just trust me bro accounting.

cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago

Remember when people talked abouthow these models are similar to gambling. Well, might be preetty much loot box logix crossed with DLC

x313•about 2 hours ago

Horrid value.

Previous $200 tier: 20x pro value

New $200 tier: 10x

New $500 tier: 25x, plus ultrafast mode but it drains 6x the cost (!!)

johnsmith1840•39 minutes ago

What? So I have 2 200$ openai plans this is saying the 500$ is almost equivalent to a SINGLE 200$ plan?

Or it's saying it's always on fast mode therefore it's like running a 20x on fast all the time?

Super confused.

500$ is a old 200$ plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast?

What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.

ModernMech•20 minutes ago

> 500$ is a old 200$ plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast?

Yes.

> What is the value here of a 500$ plan I can't figure it out.

If you have unlimited money, it lets you give it to OpenAI faster, presumably because you don't have unlimited time.

WinstonSmith84•about 2 hours ago

Where do you see that? I can't even see the $500 plan on their pricing page.

x313•about 1 hour ago

The $500 25x was mentioned by Altman on the livestream

The $200 cut to 10x was announced only formally on Twitter

However none of their product pages mention concrete #s, so I guess value will only degrade more over time.

WinstonSmith84•about 1 hour ago

Thanks...

It's strange if that ends up to be this way. It's hard to see why would anybody subscribe to the $200 - or even the $500 for the sole benefit of using ultrafast (depleted probably within hours).

minimaxir•about 2 hours ago

The pricing is on the linked page but does not appear to be selectable in ChatGPT UI yet.

petesergeant•about 1 hour ago

Literally just downgraded to the $20 a month one, as they're not grandfathering in the old plans. I don't think this is going to work the way they thought.

chaostheory•about 1 hour ago

I’ll be doing the same as you 10/26 when our grandfather limits end, in addition to downgrading my Anthropic sub. I guess I’m shopping for hardware and open weight AIs now.

linuxftw•about 1 hour ago

The plan page just says "More usage" it doesn't say any 10x multiplier. Literally just says "More" than plus.

cyral•about 1 hour ago

Seriously, even the "Learn more about limits" link just takes you to the posted page where it literally says nothing about limits or usage. Not even x20 or x10 or whatever, just zero information on what "more usage" actually means. I don't understand why they can't provide how much token usage you get.

theturtletalks•about 1 hour ago

Yes they used to show an estimate of how many messages you can send in each tier and for each model.

But past few weeks, I don’t think it was accurate since my usage was going down faster. They nerfed the usage and now aren’t even giving estimates.

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

I checked it's actually awful lol

solfox•28 minutes ago

It's actually insane how often I switch between Anthropic and Codex subscriptions. The experience on these platforms is a bit like riding a roller coaster.

minimaxir•about 2 hours ago

> New subscriptions that aren’t eligible for grandfathering include a lower usage allowance than previously offered with Pro 200 to reflect our increasingly efficient models.

actual lol

heywoods•about 2 hours ago

> New rider trips include a higher base fare than previously offered with Uber to reflect our increasingly efficient trip routing. - Travis K.

Enjoy the Lyft v Uber era while it lasts!

ModernMech•about 2 hours ago

lol yeah, I opened the Uber app the other day to $100 fares, remembered a time when I could get anywhere in SF at any time for like $5.

thallium205•about 2 hours ago

$5 flat group rides, $8 flat single rides anywhere in the city. The glory days.

wyre•41 minutes ago

When I first learned about Uber ~14 years ago they were offering free rides in my city.

rtaylorgarlock•about 2 hours ago

Oh don't worry, you get to keep your higher usage allowance for one month. hahahaha

rafram•about 2 hours ago

I guess they got tired of people saying Codex plans were a better value than Claude Code.

cousinbryce•about 1 hour ago

Tired of their investors saying that

Galilyou•about 2 hours ago

they were! now they are not

ferrouswheel•about 1 hour ago

Conveniently Opus 5.5 is actually usable vs 5.

But I'm still for investing in local models.

InsideOutSanta•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, with Opus 5.5, my impression is that the OpenAI $200 plan was already worse than the Anthropic $200 plan. Sol 6.1 might have tilted the balance in OpenAI's favor again, but these changes more than negate that.

I'll cancel my OpenAI plan after this billing cycle. Let's see how this plays out.

bhelkey•about 2 hours ago

> See the pricing page for a comparison of the features and usage included in each plan.

Does anyone see the usage limits? I don't see anything indicating how much usage is in each tier.

I checked:

* https://chatgpt.com/pricing/

* https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9793128-about-chatgpt-pr...

* https://chatgpt.com/#pricing (signed in plan upgrade page)

mstaoru•about 1 hour ago

These days it's all like "$200 plan has more usage than $100 plan" and "$500 plan has even more usage".

thimabi•about 1 hour ago

It’s about time for some laws against unpredictable pricing like that.

buckleyourshoe•about 2 hours ago

I wonder how this will go with the new releases like MiMo-v2.6-Pro or future GLM, DeepSeek, and Kimi releases around the corner. Once planned with Fable or Astra, the build process isn't much different with the open weight models from my usage.

paimapi•about 1 hour ago

you can pretty much run frontier-level models locally now with GLM 5.3 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next so this pricing feels very geared towards squeezing people who are still dependent on cloud subscription models only and don't know how to divert grunt work to cheaper models automatically with the 'smarter' frontier models acting as orchestrators and refinement

https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/chinese-flash-models-a...

therepanic•about 2 hours ago

It's funny how, just before that, they tactfully cut the limits on the $200 subscription.

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

Been doing it slowly for months week over week allowances have been getting cut by 5-10% consistently

tonyedgecombe•about 2 hours ago

What a strange idea to name your product after it's price.

rpozarickij•about 1 hour ago

On the plus side, it'll be easier to compare these new plans than what we have with all the models.

It looks like they have literally chosen the most straightforward sounding plan names they could think of.

damsta•about 2 hours ago

People complained about burning their weekly usage in a day on Pro 200, so OpenAI's response to that is an even more expensive plan?

chaostheory•about 1 hour ago

Way easier to do with Anthropic plans, but I guess subsidized AI is over? Didn’t think it was happening this soon.

xaksnTMu2•about 2 hours ago

For a second I was worried I somehow missed 490 versions.

ferrouswheel•about 2 hours ago

Lowering usage limits, increasing price.

This is just the beginning. Migrate to open models ASAP.

5555watch•about 1 hour ago

My favorite comparison was that we're basically buying a GTX 1070 Ti every month, except instead of a GPU we get some extra productivity.

yzydserd•about 2 hours ago

Great naming scheme that doesn’t even survive exchange rates, or future price changes.

TomGarden•about 2 hours ago

Venture capital doesn't want to pay for our tokens anymore, it seems

scottyah•about 1 hour ago

dangit, I've been loving the subsidies.

1970-01-01•about 2 hours ago

At this rate I expect end-to-end work getting done, no babysitting whatsoever. The agents should literally be calling me and talking about their problem if something needs my input.

fragmede•31 minutes ago

Notifications from both the ChatGPT and Claude app hit my phone when they finish a turn writing code.

AndrewKemendo•about 2 hours ago

We’re getting pretty close to that being the normal process at this point

I know people who have been at this as stage since around 4o with their own custom systems

jdkdkfkffk•about 1 hour ago

Me too, I'd say we are about two weeks away

kube-system•about 1 hour ago

To those balking at the price: this is just the beginning.

Subscription pricing will eventually compete with labor costs

KronisLV•38 minutes ago

I had the 200 USD subscription for a bit, with the change to it I'm downgrading to 100 USD and might move back to Anthropic in entirety since they fixed the Opus 5 slop writing issue with Opus 5.5 (though their 200 USD plan is also a lie with bad marketing, around 1.7x weekly tokens). Or maybe just keep two 100 USD subscriptions and see how they compare.

It's crazy that people will have to pay 500 USD for only slightly more (and faster) usage of basically what I already enjoyed for the past few weeks. And even I got close to hitting weekly limits doing regular development across a bunch of codebases (admittedly it was on Astra High).

I feel like even the 500 USD subscriptions are not "get out of my face with those limits for all single developer use cases" (not even that many overnight tasks, I might have run a few here and there, and not even full 8 hours of work a day), but soon you'll have people needing multiple of those 500 USD subscriptions, unless they pull off crazy token efficiency gains for how the models work.

Guess the economics are catching up to AI companies, sucks that I don't have a bunch of money to burn every month.

glub•about 2 hours ago

This day may go down in history as one of the worst in OpenAI's history. It's so bad it's funny.

OpenAI announced they built clones of apps that already exist, codex for normal people, and 2.5x price increase for the product that is already getting decimated by competition.

What is happening at OpenAI?

I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.

bhu8•about 1 hour ago

> I can't imagine OpenAI not backtracking this unless Anthropic does the price hike too.

Same here, but I’m worried it’s the latter. We’ll probably see an Anthropic price hike in a couple of weeks.

glub•41 minutes ago

Interesting thing is that I would have expected Anthropic to do the price hike on the basis that their models are so much better right now. But it's more likely that OAI will have to backtrack regardless of what ANT does. Interesting times ahead.

If ANT does the price hike, OAI will be forced to backtrack because they're just not equal, OAI is behind. ANT would still be a much better value overall, and people will remember that it was OAI that made their ANT subscription more expensive. So the hiatus will happen. There's a lot of users that have $200 plans on both ANT and OAI. $500 leaves the slot for just 1 sub for them.

But I think the price hike is not going to happen. $500 is much, much harder to justify than $200 for the same usage. This is a horrible business decision, so Anthropic may just watch OAI bleed customers.

skybrian•about 2 hours ago

The $20/month subscription is an excellent deal. I wonder what these whales are doing with all those tokens?

I mean, other than Yegge. He seems like a pretty extreme outlier?

iAMkenough•about 1 hour ago

Found a whale: "It took OpenAI's agents 130 billion tokens to crack a 90-year-old math problem" https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-math-problem-solved-t...

Jayakumark•about 1 hour ago

Could hire real people in India for this cost - Fresh college under grads are paid like $250 per month or less for a month working 9hours x 5.5 to 6 days.

avgDev•38 minutes ago

I would rather use a skilled dev + AI. As dev I am more likely to learn from AI, as it is better at explaining concepts than devs fresh out of school.

scottyah•about 1 hour ago

Hmm, a super-programmer familiar with almost every framework in existence that can ship entire new apps in a day and collaborate with you realtime, or paying to train someone in a different time zone for some likely subpar work?

kube-system•about 1 hour ago

But they're slower and don't work in my timezone. The value to something like this isn't the ability to do work, but the ability to quickly iterate.

squidbeak•about 1 hour ago

Could you hire hundreds of them over long running tasks for that fixed price to work every day and night for a month?

isoprophlex•about 2 hours ago

> If your Pro 200 subscription was active at the eligibility cutoff or during the seven days before it, you’re eligible to keep your previous included usage allowance through Oct 29, 2026 while you have an active Pro 200 subscription.

> After that date, your subscription will move to the lower included usage allowance. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.

Imagine buying this shit for a year, upfront, and then having to deal with this. Nice.

DominikPeters•about 1 hour ago

You can't, Pro is only available with monthly payment.

linuxftw•about 1 hour ago

No actual mention of the actual 'cutoff date' anywhere to be seen. Was it today? Yesterday? 6 months ago?

Robdel12•about 2 hours ago

Yeah no. $200 was the top for me. Which doesn't super matter to me, I pretty much only use luna. I can't tell the difference between luna vs sol/astra other than those larger models do more ambitious things that I don't ask for.

LarsDu88•about 2 hours ago

Is this Astra running on Cerebras?

mixel•about 2 hours ago

No this is just the 500$ plan. They offer "ultrafast" now which is ~300tps which is 8x the speed for 6x the price.

LarsDu88•about 1 hour ago

I think 300 tps might be roughly what an astra sized model would be at if running on Cerebras hardware no?

Or are they simply lower the batch sizes on whatever hardware they are currently running?

mixel•about 1 hour ago

Yeah sorry I misunderstood you. And yeah I bet that it is the cerebras collaboration although they didn't explicitly say this, maybe their own chip is fast enough for this inference speed? But I could only take a guess if its this or that

sprice•about 1 hour ago

Almost certainly yes. The value prop here is the 8x speed. This is incredibly valuable to many many builders.

babelfish•about 1 hour ago

Yes that's their new ultrafast tier which is only available on this plan

derfurth•about 2 hours ago

Given that I burn through 2 x $200 subscriptions, I really hope Sol 6.1 is indeed as good as Astra (￣ー￣；

Hawkenfall•about 2 hours ago

Why would I pay $500 now when the $200 features were just rug-pulled? I mean, Pro 1000 is on the horizon at this point, no?

sixdimensional•about 1 hour ago

Price escalation and reduction in features just leaves a horrible taste in my mouth as a consumer, and moreso, a human.

I want them to succeed as a business so I can use their products, but trust does erode over time. I wish they would realize this and value their customer more.

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

Yea, the $500 package is likely a rebranded $200 from a few months ago. Keep in mind all providers have been cutting token allowances for their subs for a few months now

leftouterjoins•about 1 hour ago

DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is good enough for me thanks.

VCFundedGenYer•about 1 hour ago

Pure scam pricing.

jdw64•about 2 hours ago

Is AI development hitting its limits?

The performance changes between models are almost static. Recently, GPT has shifted almost entirely toward token efficiency.

Astra is good at making 3D assets, but realistically its coding was not as good as GPT 5.6 Sol.

Have we reached a point where getting better at one thing means starting to get worse at another?

This announcement is the worst one yet.

Nerfing existing usage A more expensive top-tier plan Showing off how slow Dots is right in the demo video And GPT Space—are they telling us to use it instead of Notion or what...

Overall, throughout the entire announcement, everything OpenAI wants me to look forward to just leaves me, as a developer, disappointed.

rfgplk•about 1 hour ago

Yep. It's hitting limits because models have effectively reached the logical endpoint of how "precise" their outputs can become. In order to overcome this they need to either a) get excellent at outputting and working with massive codebases (10+ million loc) since a singificant % of systems simply cannot be done in less than that (the language itself isn't expressive enough) or b) reach the next stage of intelligence where the models are somehow able to output sequences that can solve vast complex problems with a very narrow output. Option b isn't really possible (various statistical/computational fundamental limitations forbid it) and option A is _insanely_ expensive. Which is why all of the demos the frontier labs have been pushing out are either really impressive one shot demos where the model is able to take a concise input and produce something great on its own, or very long running internal sessions where they claim to do something vast with minimal oversight (NavierStokes, C compiler, Bun rewrite).

ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago

Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889306

chaostheory•about 1 hour ago

At this price points (including the reduction of usage on the Pro 200 and Pro 100 subscriptions), more people will be looking buying their own hardware and running with open weight AIs. $6000 per year is the threshold

scottyah•about 1 hour ago

It's a bit more complicated than that though. Dollars per token is not the right metric to track.

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

Decent(-ish), but doesn't provide good value for the money, sadly. They still refuse to tell you exactly how much usage you're paying for. My original suggestion a few months ago was to provide a $500/$1000 tier but make it _unlimited_, which this doesn't appear to be.

adamrezich•about 2 hours ago

Very cool how I'm supposed to feel good about paying $200/mo (a VERY expensive subscription!) for months, just to be told that in the near (but not immediate) future this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value I used to get.

Fuck that shit!