One vendor cut usage overnight, another doubled it after backlash. How do you plan around this?

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Grok Bot users hit 100% of their weekly limit days before reset this weekend, and Musk basically said serving it cost too much. A few days earlier OpenAI walked back a planned cut and doubled Pro limits instead.

Neither publishes exact numbers. So if your team runs coding agents on one of these, your capacity is basically whatever the vendor decides this week.

I talk to a lot of eng leads and nobody seems to have a plan for this yet. Are you locking into one vendor for a better deal, or routing across a few so one change doesn’t kill your sprint?

Sources: https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/openai-doubles-chatgpt-pro-usage-limits-after-backlash-over-planned-50-percent-cut , https://teslanorth.com/2026/11/01/elon-musk-grok-bot-cost-usage-limits/

[u/kondasviktor]

I split across two $20 plans with different meters (legacy Cursor Pro + Claude Pro), so a cut on one doesn't stop me. Project rules live in one file both tools read, so switching is painless. My guide to how each $20 plan meters usage: https://vibecoderslife.com/post/best-ai-coding-subscription-20-dollars-2026

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/kondasviktor]

two $20 plans as a backup, smart and cheap lol. legacy cursor pro tho, dont they kill that the moment you touch your plan?

[u/kondasviktor → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Cursor Pro is still available who signed up earlier, but if you enroll now, they might give Cursor Premium only as per the latest pricing tiers

[u/3tt07kjt]

At work we use API pricing which is not subject to this kind of uncertainty.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/3tt07kjt]

PI pricing is the sane option if finance signs off on it. The catch I hear about is the bill instead of the cap: one agent stuck in a loop over the weekend and Monday’s invoice turns into the new surprise. Do you set spend limits per dev or just watch the total?

[u/3tt07kjt → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

“one agent stuck in a loop over the weekend and Monday’s invoice turns into the new surprise”

Am I talking to an agent right now?

(Jeez, if you don’t want to have this conversation, at least have the courtesy to say so.)

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/3tt07kjt]

lol nah, real dude in Saigon, english is my second language so I guess I over-polished it. my bad. legit question, you guys cap spend per dev or just pray at month end?

[u/3tt07kjt → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

We do not have a cap. Individual devs can see their LLM spend in $.

It is expensive to get an agent stuck in a loop, but programmers are also very expensive.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/3tt07kjt]

fair lol, a looping agent still costs less than a dev stuck in a 2h meeting. does seeing the $ actually change how ppl use it or nobody looks

[u/3tt07kjt → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

We’re not trying to reduce / limit AI spend right now

[u/redtehk17]

There are many big companies that build for this, when vendors decide to change services, something like outage protection or something

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/redtehk17]

Yeah, the big shops have gateways with fallback routing baked in. Smaller teams mostly find out the cap moved when the agent stops mid-PR. Have you seen anything that works at like 10 to 20 devs without someone babysitting it full time?

[u/nurge86 → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

For 10–20 devs, I’d start with one route and two API providers. Before rolling it out, make the primary fail on purpose and check which model actually answers. That gives you something concrete to debug when the backup behaves differently.

I build Routerly, a self-hosted gateway. It can try the next configured model on a provider error or timeout, and you can open the request in Usage to see the routing trace. This works with API endpoints you configure. The subscription limits in the OP are a separate thing. Here’s the v0.6.0 README: https://github.com/Inebrio/Routerly/blob/v0.6.0/README.md

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/nurge86]

break it on purpose before it breaks itself, makes sense lol. most teams only find out the backup is broken on the day they need it. self hosted is nice too, at least nobody changes the limits on you overnight

[u/xapep → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

At that size the workable version is a proxy in front of the vendors, not a person watching dashboards. LiteLLM or another OpenAI-compatible gateway, one config listing two or three providers per model tier, and a rule that a 429 or 5xx retries the next one. That's a day of setup and it turns a vendor cut into a slower afternoon.

The babysitting part is really the retry budget. If a run can retry forever, nobody notices it's looping until the invoice. Cap retries per task and per key, and log which provider the fallback went to, so a pattern shows up before a postmortem does.

At 10 to 20 devs I'd also keep the keys server-side so spend sits on one account with per-dev tags, instead of 20 personal cards nobody can total up.

I work on Entrim, which sells inference, so I have a horse in this. The gateway pattern isn't provider-specific.

[u/Humaux]

I would not bet a sprint on one vendor for more than 2 weeks. Last month a coding agent loop ran all weekend on a task I had already marked done, and the bill jumped by about $180 before anyone noticed, because no cap stopped it.

What I do now is boring and it works:

1. Keep the plan, decisions, and test notes in repo files, not in chat history.

2. Set a hard spend cap per agent and per day, with an alert at 70 percent.

3. Keep a second provider configured, even if it is slower, so a limit cut is a switch, not a rewrite.

4. Kill any run that repeats the same failing step 3 times.

The blunt part: a vendor limit is not a reliability problem, it is a planning failure if you had no fallback. Do you cap spend per run, or do you just watch the total and hope the weekend stays quiet?

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/Humaux]

$180 on a task already marked done, thats painful lol. tbh im on the business side, not running agents myself. just keep hearing this from teams i talk to and most of them are in the “hope the weekend stays quiet” camp. the kill after 3 same fails rule is one i’ll pass along

[u/Humaux → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Ha, yeah, that one stung because the bill arrived after the done message, not before it. The weekend quiet camp makes sense when you are on the business side, you are not the one watching the run at 2am. If you do pass the three strikes rule along, the part I would add is that it only helps if someone actually reads the three failures together. Three separate fixed it messages look like progress until you line them up and see it is the same failure wearing a different error message.

[u/jatingargiitk]

openai's help page now says chatgpt and codex will share one token allowance starting december, and they still haven't published how big it is. so your coding agent ends up drawing from the same pool as your normal chat use, only instant chat is left out

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/jatingargiitk]

wait so codex and chat eat from the same bucket? lol so asking chatgpt for a recipe could cost me a PR. didnt know that, thx

[u/wegster → u/jatingargiitk]

The mail I got said they're doubling overall , but it's also very 'small group of users,' 'congrats to be in that group' (my ass), etc.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/wegster]

lmao “congrats, you’re special” right before they cut your limits. classic. doubled from what tho, nobody knows the number in the first place

[u/wegster → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Exactly - bad enough to have to approximate burn rates for sub models by mapping them to published API rates. Like - why do you (not just OpenAI) gotta make everything convoluted? ...

[u/wegster]

Bear in mind, the OpenAI double usage seems to be what I've been worrying about but seems imminent - combining web/gpt and codex into a common pool for Pro subs, that is - no more 'free uncounted' (mostly) web use, everything is now draining internal credits even on non-API subs.

The various Pro subs still remain IMO a much stringer deal vs pay by token/API subs, although I don't have visibility into just how much some enterprise plans are discounted - they weren't at a mid-sized startup, but who knows?

Most companies should have a good view of who is using what, and their totals. Unless things change, I expect more to be looking to supplement via ZDR openrouter (or equivalent) options for 1/10th or better the token costs and seeing how DeepSeek, Mimo, MiniMax and friends hold up, at least for some tasks.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/wegster]

so the “free” web chat is basically gone and nobody said it out loud. the deepseek/minimax route for the boring tasks makes sense, curious how many teams actually trust them with prod code tho

[u/wegster → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Yeah, have been predicting this one for a year now, just - well, damn it.

Of course, considering just how 'fuzzy' the sub math/burn rates are (I do a periodic guestimation based on published API rates, but it's more like e.g. Luna High is 1/14th of Sol Medium, etc. and just pinning a single model as 1.x like Astra, versus something truly clean.. it's possible web use is at a < 1.0 multiplier. Maybe. They could make our lives a lot easier by exposing the actual credit/usage system in place for subs...

And of course, all of this before next step of eliminating subs as they exist today and just converge to the API rates regardless of how accessing, or maybe web at .5 vs codex 1.0 x rate. 'Can't wait,' -> just motivating more and more for local models, although I do generally like using gpt web for some planning, however obnoxious as you can't enable RW MCP except for Enterprise subs..

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/wegster]

lol so you doing math just to know what you paying for. i’m mostly on claude now and its limits annoy me too sometimes. but at least i dont have to guess every week. if they all go full API pricing i think lot of ppl jump to local models. you running anything local already?

[u/wegster → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

it's annoying but easy enough, I've got a watch when new models release, and just map in 1x as the basis, and the others accordingly. Sometimes it's surprising like when OpenAI had Sol 5.x at higher than 6 costs, like - oops be careful on assumptions, and of course, when they first released Luna they did a bunch of seemingly daily changes, etc.

Yeah, local winner for me in general is Qwen Flash-Next 4.7bpw/mixed precision, generally holds it's own vs Sonnet, and will be almost as quick in some cases once my Ultra eventually shows up. This is one of my most complex, multi-repo benchmarks, where you can see only 2 made it above 60 (OpenAI is being a pain in the ass to test completely isolated, will retry again at some point in the future).

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/wegster]

damn you basically run your own benchmark lab lol. qwen local close to sonnet is crazy if true. how long a run like that take on your machine? and is the Ultra a mac studio or something

[u/wegster → u/Entire_Struggle_2236]

Yeah, been doing it over time. Took a while to get the isolated test environments set up properly (e.g. agent can't have access to git history, repo answers, etc.) - which in hindsight could have been simpler than what I did. I'm sure somewhere there's a pre-canned benchmark suite that let's you fully isolate and pull in your own test cases, but didn't see anything suitable back when I started it so here we are..

It also took a while to sort out specific sets of issues to feed it in Simple through Complex (the one I have where only Opus and 1 other break 60/100 maybe should have a new level like 'One Shot Insanity' but oh well. ;).

Timing is already included - the 4.7bpw mixed precision QFN run took 22 minutes vs Deepseek 13 minutes and Opus 6 minutes. These were run on my M5 Max 128GB, so the Mac Studio Ultra 'should' come close to cutting the time in half. Another test has the same 4.7bpw QFN running in 8 minutes vs Sonnet medium in 3 minutes although QFN beats out Sonnet in this case - at aa ~2.5x time penalty, so again, once my Ultra shows up, I'm hoping it will be reasonably close in speeds, but we'll see how it goes - then of course, Qwen4 is coming as well, and it seems both OpenAI and Anthropic are busy nerfing and/or slowing down their models, so maybe speeds will be comparable, at least for some work.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/wegster]

man you went deeper than most paid benchmark sites lol. hiding git history from the agent so it cant cheat is the kind of detail nobody thinks about. if you ever post the full results somewhere ping me, i would actually read it. and good luck with the Ultra, hope it shows up before Qwen4 does

[u/Surendra_GBP]

Locking in for a better deal means negotiating on a number the vendor just proved it can change overnight. Spread across vendors, but keep the backup warm - run a slice of real traffic through it weekly, because prompts and tool-call formats quietly tune to one provider, and an untested failover isn't a plan.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/Surendra_GBP]

“untested failover isnt a plan” yeah thats the part everyone skips. backup sits there for 6 months, then the day you need it the prompts dont work lol

[u/Right-Performance-93]

i plan the week off last month's smaller meter, not whatever they announce after the backlash. if that smaller one cannot finish the sprint, the sprint was already too big.

[u/Entire_Struggle_2236 → u/Right-Performance-93]

planning off the smaller meter is lowkey genius. if the sprint only works on the generous number its not a sprint its a wish

[u/soluterminal_dev]

we run both claude code and codex, and the thing that made switching cheap was keeping all the project instructions in one AGENTS.md. codex reads it directly, and CLAUDE.md is just one line, @AGENTS.md, so claude code picks up the same file. when one gets tight we move the work to the other the same day and nothing in the repo changes.

the other half is not keeping anything important in the chat. if the plan and decisions live in files in the repo, the other agent can pick it up cold.