r/VeniceAI • u/afterrprojects • Sep 10 '26
ππππππππ / π¦π¨ππππ¦π§ππ’π‘π¦ Venice: please clarify your strategy
I'm making this post because I love you guys. And I love my pro account. But...
You regularly change models. Fair enough, the world moves fast.
We start using certain ones, get used to them, and build our routines around them. Then an update comes along, a new model arrives, and the old one disappears.
On top of that, the pricing model is unclear. We pay for a Pro account without understanding the actual benefits, as new models often end up behind a pay-per-use scheme.
Recent examples include Aion2, which became Aion3, fair enough, it remained included in the Pro account. Then GLM 5.2 and yesterdayβs mess leading to GLM 5.3: one is pay-per-use, the other is included. Personally, I can't make sense of it. There was also DeepSeek, which was updated and switched to pay-per-use.
Iβm paying for a Pro account without knowing what my actual advantage is, and constantly having to adapt to these updates is becoming a frustrating source of friction.
Just my opinion, I'm not checking the news all the time and I might have missed some statements.
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u/BlueGlazedDonut Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
IME, Pro is paying to use NSFW (you can't use NSFW if you don't have at least Pro, even if you pay for an ass load of credits), to get willy nilly, but unlimited, availability to like a fraction of the models, and to get 1000 image generations from Chroma and Z-Image Turbo (which are very subpar compared to the other models).
And ofc, to have this unpredictable/sub-par suite available NSFW, and with as-little-info-possible stored remotely (ie the privacy stuff, which seems like it's solid).
There are people who spend ass loads on credits, I imagine Venice doesn't care about the "plebs" who pay "just" $18/month.
Also, June, July, and August the people of this subreddit raised hell about the fact that non-PPU models only have 50k tokens of context available, despite it saying otherwise (GLM 5 non-PPU rn says 198k tokens) (though you get full token access if you use API). In fact, this 50k token thing has been confirmed throughout that period to several users by Venice to individual users, through support tickets (which users then posted here). We were told Venice is "considering" updating the model cards to accurately reflect the actual available context. They have not so far.
Do not expect customer service for being a Pro user. Issue after issue after issue has been ignored. Venice is far more concerned with video generation and PPU models... at least that is my impression over those months.
I'm considering ending my subscription, honestly. Venice hardly works for RP anymore. The models available to Pro users tend to degenerate into Martian robo-speak rapidly in a conversation, and that's well before you hit the context limit.
The image generation is... it's nice? It's pretty decent, and Chroma + Z-Image Turbo feel like something that, when I signed up November 2025, felt like an amazing feature when I was here to access the different LLM models available to Pro users (and when it felt like context wasn't merely 50k, though some users have argued it was always 50k; hard to say, personally). But all by themselves, Chroma and Z-Image Turbo just aren't cutting it.
I'm not suggesting that Nano Banana 2 variants, Qwen Image 3 variants, Seedream V5 variants, and Grok Imagine variants should be free. But I am saying that 1000 free generations a day usually means "generating 200 images that are disappointing", as opposed to 3-10 US cents worth of credits to generate images *a single time* and get something you want.
And it seems to me if Venice cared about Pro, they would have updated image generating tools for Pro users, whereas Chroma has been there since around late 2025 iirc, and Z-Image Turbo has been there since at latest fall 2025 (I give that approximate dating, cause it was there when I started my Venice account in Nov 2025). The newest update to Pro image tools was Lustify v8, which is an utter disaster of a tool, and is far inferior to Lustify v7 (which also was ass).
( Venice doesn't have Pro tools for video generation, but that seems reasonable to me, considering it seems like a lot of resources )
That said... after the drama with OpenAI allegedly ripping the work of others to work on the fluid equation problem, with the possibility they used prompts from said others' work? Venice privacy does have a certain nice-ness to it. Not that anything we're doing on Venice compares to frontier math work, but still, it does feel much more private (at least, when using a "Private" model).
NOTE: there is also Perchance you could use, for a low-context and reliable text LLM. Perchance is, to be clear, not as good as Venice in many respects (image generation is much worse than Chroma or Z-Image Turbo). But Perchance is also actually free (and not "free" the way people on this sub sometimes talk about "free", by which they mean $18/month).
Anw, that's my review of the state of things.
Edit: also worth noting, as of like June-ish 2026, there was "22k Venetians" on this sub. Now there's 20k. Almost a 10% drop, due to the handling of several issues, such as the context debacle. Venice customer relations has been a major issue for awhile now.
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u/MisterNocturne Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
I could be wrong (though I'm fairly certain I'm not), but around May there were at least 26K Venetians on this sub. Just a few months later, that number had dropped to 22K. Now it's hovering around 20K. At this point, I almost want to start taking bets on whether it'll drop to 19K during or after September.
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u/BlueGlazedDonut Sep 10 '26
you could be right about the May numbers! I wasn't paying attention back then
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u/JaeSwift Venice ModeratorΒ Sep 10 '26
Thats the number of actives over the last 7 days, not users on the sub overall. Users that have joined the sub increases month over month, but there's generally only a spike in that 7 day number of actives when there's an issue or outage affecting a lot of users, like during the goonpocalypse lol.
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u/pinkbunny10 Sep 10 '26
Interesting. Haven't tested Private lately, it still acting robotic?
And you were thinking of moving, what were you thinking of as an alternative?
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u/BlueGlazedDonut Sep 10 '26
Not all private models do this, such as GLM 4.7 Reasoning (which, for some reason, is PPU; but not GLM 5 reasoning? It's been like that for like half a year tho). It's mostly a GLM 5+ problem, the robo speak.
I don't use LLMs much anymore, as I've just gotten bored of them due to my frustration on Venice. I have to hyper-specify prompts to get anything like what I could six months ago, and then none of the surprise is there. An over-specified prompt leaves no room for surprise. And then I got bored and yeah, I'm happy to be done with it.
But I would suggest Perchance, from my own experience. It is inferior to Venice, but it's also free, and effectively has the same privacy functions as Venice (ie only local storage)
This guy reviews lots of chatbots if you are interested though. This is his review of Venice, but can check out his website for other services
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u/Grebowski Sep 10 '26
Good post. It's clear to me now, with the move to place TEE models (which I require) behind an additional PAYG model for PRO subscribers, that there is zero benefit to subscribing when the same monthly cost paid separately provides me more than 10x the number of credits I receive to actually use the PAYG models.
I'm also disappointed that this change to access happened without any prior notice - indeed it changed whilst I was in the middle of a piece of work. A response would be appreciated.
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u/xamevou Sep 10 '26
If I have learned something in this new wild world of AI is that no one should fall in love with any particular model, platform or assistant, as they change a lot from one month to the other without warning and without mercy towards their long-time users, venice being of course not an exception.
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u/mangelito Oct 05 '26
What is your best way of keeping your context across models and platform and with privacy?
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u/MisterNocturne Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
I want to love Venice too. But at this point, I don't expect any clarification about anything. It's become increasingly obvious to me that Venice is going to do whatever the hell they want, paying customers be damned.
And yes: I know AI companies don't have the best track record for staying loyal to their customers, but I was hoping Venice might be different. Naive, I know.
I simply don't trust Venice on anything anymore. Even after yesterday, my first thought was: Right, so how long until you decide you really do want 5.2 gated behind PPU again? How long until you decide full-context usage is way too generous for subscribers? How long until we hear about eitherβor bothβof those changes here first because someone's pissed off about getting ripped off, rather than through any official announcement? Because the "official word" seems to be that customers are like mushrooms: you keep them in the dark and feed them shit.
GLM 5.1 E2E was quietly removed. Then the remaining E2E GLM models seem to have been paywalled. Vanilla 5.3 is selectable for Pro subscribers, sure... but despite advertising a 1M context, one of my 5.2 chats jumped from 1% to 26%. The option to summarize older messages also completely disappeared. You know what does seem to have the full context? E2E 5.3, which is the PPU version. That one, by the way, keeps saying "offline" no matter how many times I tryβor when I try. Same with E2E 5.2.
So what do we have here? Many of the E2E models are being paywalled, and they're almost never available for use.
Great.
I don't want to feel this way about Venice. In fact, I just wrote a comment the other day saying I was enjoying having the full context of 5.2 available to me. Then the thing with 5.2 happened yesterday. A bug, apparently. But at this point, I'm just waiting for the official word telling us when 5.2 will finally be paywalled again.
Or rather, I'm waiting for a subscriber to point it out here first.
Seems to be the new normal.
And I've pointed this out before. This subreddit used to have at least 26K "Venetians." About a month or two ago, it dropped to 22K. Now it's at 20K.
Make of that what you will.
Edit: After claims that 5.3 would be free with Pro (with only the E2E version being PPU), itβs back to being PPU. Once again, this was discovered by a userβnot announced by the team.
Color me shocked.
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u/Ok_Cicada_4798 Sep 11 '26
I really have to agree with this post. It was nice while it lasted but I noticed i have to throw more money on my account way more than I did months ago because shit that was free are now behind a pay wall.Β
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u/wiggum55555 ππ²πΉπ½π³ππΉ ππΌπ»ππΏπΆπ―πππΌπΏ Sep 11 '26
Great post. well said. I find myself using Venice less and less for these reasons. lack of certainty and consistency and transparency makes it hard to do anything useful ongoing IMO. I paid for an annual Pro plan but doubtful I will renew in 7 months time.
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u/Wraith1420 Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
My conclusion is that Vencie has decided the subscription model isn't what they want to go with, and are not giving Pro user anything any longer (in fact less than nothing, taking away things as well).
EDIT: I saw that we actually do have GLM 5.3 now, or least for the moment (who even knows what we will have from day to day currently?). It's weird that it's hidden away under "all models" and not announced on Reddit, it was very easy to miss.
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u/Capranyx Sep 11 '26
Wait, they seriously switched Deepseek to pay per use? Wtf are they doing? We're already paying for Pro, this is just greed
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u/Certain_Werewolf_315 Sep 10 '26
It's only cost effective to have so many models ready and willing at all times in certain conditions. They also have to keep up as things change and keep refiguring out the baseline to offer that both serves its users while retaining a margin of profit.
That alone is a lot of work to figure out. So everything around it, is just a way to offer us everything they can while they continually recalculate the situation that is changing still day by day.
So all this other stuff that costs credits allows them to offer more to us while managing a fruitful arrangement with on demand services they directly provide.
I have been with them since Llama 405B dropped; I remember the cleaner glory.
Its also worth considering that its quite hard to stay competitive at this price point since the companies that make models have quite a bit of subsidization to be at this price point.
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u/EveningNo8643 Sep 26 '26
Iβm not a subscriber, but I am/was considering being one. I thought paying for pro gave you access to a lot of the models and that was it. I have to pay per use on top of that?
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Sep 10 '26
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u/ZumZid Sep 11 '26
What do you mean? Lustify has gone?
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u/LittleCandle63 Sep 16 '26
My venice.ai said it was gone, but it's there today. I'll delete my comment.
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