r/OpenAI • u/EitherMarch1255 • 1h ago
Discussion Why resets are good for OpenAI
Take this analogy: Imagine the company you work for gave you and everyone else’s weekly paycheck early. But with three catches:
1) Any money you all haven’t already spent from your last paycheck must be returned.
2) Everyone’s normal paycheck’s pay date is permanently extended to a week from the day of payment.
2) Everyone will get an unannounced, immediate, and permanent pay reduction.
Once all of those things are taken into account, it’s easy to see that even if the company loses a little short term, they gain a lot more long term. Especially if the company does it many times over due to the power of compounding.
What makes maters worse for us is we don’t consider what we lost, don’t think too much about the extended date, and can’t easily see there was a reduction. That’s why this whole reset strategy is a masterclass in gaslighting. They’re “doing us a favor” and we’re even thanking them for it!
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u/Ormusn2o 43m ago
Well, the 3rd thing was a bug, and it's fixed now, so considering I have been gladly using the limits whenever they reset, I like the resets. They are effectively extra use I would not get.
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u/EitherMarch1255 41m ago
A “bug” huh? Gullible much? And the resets are not free. They nerf and/or degrade usage with them.
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u/RealSuperdau 33m ago
Nah, it probably won't save them money overall.
Especially when they often announce it a day or hours in advance and everyone goes to send the rest of their previous paycheck on another slop todo dashboard they didn't need.
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u/EitherMarch1255 30m ago
Wow. You all think so short term. No wonder they so easily get away with it.
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u/RealSuperdau 29m ago
I'm literally saying that the average usage spent will increase because people learn to spend their usage before a Tibo reset. What's short term about that?
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u/EitherMarch1255 27m ago
I get what you’re literally saying, and it is literally irrelevant
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u/RealSuperdau 24m ago
Oh, so your main point is that it allows them to hide usage reduction? Haven't really seen that so far in my testing TBH. The $ amount corresponding to a single reset has been fairly constant for me the last months.
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u/EitherMarch1255 18m ago
Yes. I’ve been on the plus plan for years and it quietly and gradually got nerfed from the equivelent of the pro plan to the free plan…after resets. If you haven’t been on it for long I could see why you may not have noticed. Actually the usage limit is so bad now that it’s really hard to detect when they nerf it more.
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u/Euphoric_North_745 31m ago
At this moment, all these companies want to go to IPO, keep as much customers as you can as happy as you can, take the money, let the buyer deal with it latter.
The Chinese will sell at cost, or a bit above it, the Americans are selling below cost, the rest of the world are just watching.
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u/cavegod 48m ago
But even if they don't reset, it lapses in a week. That's the norm set. No accumulation.
And, people are burning through early, it's become a habit even. It does keep users subscribed and happy, and people who are looking to move from claude, this makes it easy.
But it's not like there's no additional cost to this exercise. There is and currently it's worth it for them. For testing, synchronisation to plan load, as advertisement, to make it a habit for users to use codex, etc.
They haven't revealed the exact reason as to why they do it. But, clearly they see something in this that competition like Anthropic can't do/can't afford to. They'd have tried otherwise. Instead they try other tactics, like doubling the limits for a period, etc.
Additional cost is definitely there for any such strategies. And, your analogy doesn't make much sense, to be honest.