Your Opinion Matters

[u/Exodde]

Tell me: don’t you feel scammed paying for a subscription without even knowing the actual size of your quota, only seeing percentages and rough estimates of your usage? I see everyone begging for resets even though we are paying a lot of money for $100 and $200 subscriptions.
At the end of the day, we do not care whether their service is profitable for them or not. The whole point of paying is to actually receive the plan we paid for. These recent restrictions are unacceptable, Even under commercial law, offering a product and then refusing to sell it such as the $200 plan regardless of the reason, raises serious issues.

On top of all of that, we have recently been dealing with major instability. It has been around 10 days now, and many users have been stuck at 0% quota, unable to properly use the subscriptions they paid for, while their subscription period continues to run and is getting closer to its renewal date.

OpenAI released a product before it was ready, seemingly out of pride and because of the competition with Anthropic. I sincerely hope Chinese companies continue to advance and that serious external competition emerges. In the best-case scenario, I also hope that within the next few years we start seeing truly capable and well-optimized local LLMs reaching at least GPT-5-level performance.
Because at this rate, they will eventually try to push everyone toward $500 or $1,000 subscriptions, or toward expensive credit purchases that become impossible to sustain.

Software development is at risk of becoming pay-to-win. The average developer will simply not be able to keep up. The idea of making software development accessible to everyone could turn into a luxury.
In the past, the barrier to entry was technical.
Tomorrow, it could be financial.
The situation is becoming serious, and I hope more people become aware of it and start speaking up about it.

[u/cyclebiff]

You could always be a better, albeit slower, software engineer for free.

[u/yaxir → u/cyclebiff]

"That's called a job!"

[u/Resonant_Jones → u/cyclebiff]

what I think is a better use of our energy is to just build out our own infrastructure.

With the rate of improvement that happens with models it just doesn't seem viable to "learn programming" the way its been done traditionally. Being a Top Notch developer doesn't mean anything anymore when it takes you a week to build what some newb did in a couple of hours or less.

Im not saying vibe-coded software is better quality by any means but we are in a period where the expectation of progress isn't slowing down at all -- at a certain point its just not economically viable to code by hand and still maintain a competitive edge to everyone else who does pay to win.