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Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

news.ycombinator.com

141–150 of 159 posts

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#141
post #60

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.

i would love to give them $200 a month, but unfortunately I have no money

AI is just another case of the rich getting richer, people who dont really need AI with practically unlimited access, and people who need to it to try and change their lives being priced out

its a wealth inequality accelerator at the worst time in history for wealth inequality

i would take 50% less usage just to be able to use it in my own time, the plus plan without 5 hour limit gives me 1 days work a week, so 4 days of usage per month, and I was happy with that

now thats been taken away i get 15 minutes of usage then 5 hours later ive lost interest in the work, i now sit with 70% usage knowing 5 hours ago that a reset was coming and I couldnt even be bothered using it

its completely killed the product for me, im now paying 20 a month for something that is no use to me

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#143
post #124

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

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 f…

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Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#144
post #75

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

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

Harness and data seem like two vectors. It's also not clear to me that at some point we won't get a snowball effect from the platform that has the most use and thus the most training data just running away with a positive feedback loop.

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

Don't forget the criminals. When it comes to crypto, never forget the criminals.

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#146
post #17

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.

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.

> 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.

I have never heard of a drug dealer actually doing that.

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#147
post #5

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.

I combine it with OpenCode + a small OpenRouter budget. GlM 5.3 Flash, Luna, Gemini 3.7 Flash and a couple of other very cheap models are sufficient for a lot of tasks if put on the right road. Telling Astra to debug an issue should be a last resort, it would blow through 10% of the session limit, but cost like 10c on one of the open models. Same goes for exploration, documentation, configuration and smaller features. These models are generally good enough, and you can still do a review with a strong model for a fraction of the cost.

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#148
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work with inference providers behind OpenRouter? Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?

> 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…

Exactly. It is common knowledge that all the AI companies have terrible margins. IMO tokens are the cheapest they'll ever be as these companies compete for users.

Re: Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

#150
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Ok half was an exaggeration, but I think $10 might make quite a lot of them jump to Claude. Or DeepSeek. Remember, we're talking about a global user base here. I settled on GPT Plus/Codex for my own work, while my employer settled on Claude on Bedrock (where I am, according to their metrics, using about $20 of compute a day, so I can believe that GPT Plus is a loss-leader). If I hit too many 5-hour timeouts I'm not j…

I'd agree that $10 can and will make users switch to a different provider. Just as streaming music services are all price basically the same, as to avoid users just jumping to the cheapest, I think the AI companies will find a suitable price point for consumer AI. After that they'll just settle into a system where when one raise or lower their price, the rest will follow.

Those who benefit from using and LLM will continue to pay for one, regardless of provider, regardless of the price being $20 or $50.

The global aspect is interesting, because $50 is a lot of money for most of the global population. The AI advocates claim to be getting more hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of value from their subscription. In the poorest countries that should make an even greater difference, but that assumes that they can get those first $50 and that the value is actually being generated.

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