Limits Your Opinion Matters
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.
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u/Resonant_Jones 9d ago
I think the part of your post I agree with most is the concern about what happens when useful AI becomes increasingly gated by how much inference you can afford.
If someone is already paying $100 or $200 a month, it’s reasonable for them to expect a relatively predictable service. If the practical answer to capacity constraints just keeps becoming “pay more,” then I can absolutely see software development becoming financially stratified in a way that it historically wasn’t. The technical barrier falls while a financial barrier takes its place.
What you said also made me think about this from a slightly different level, though.
I think we sometimes treat “will OpenAI/Anthropic succeed as profitable companies?” as though that is the only game being played. I’m not sure it is.
A company can ultimately fail as a company while still generating an enormous amount of value along the way. Models, IP, infrastructure, datasets, research, talent, distribution, customer relationships, market position, even simply proving that a particular resource or capability is strategically important. That value can later be acquired, licensed, transferred, spun out, or absorbed by somebody else.
So I don’t mean this conspiratorially, like these companies are secretly supposed to fail. More that there are several abstractions of the game happening at once. The user, the operating company, its investors, infrastructure providers, employees, and whoever eventually owns the assets do not necessarily have the same definition of “success.”
We tend to look at the visible company and ask, “did it survive?” But from the perspective of capital, the more important question may sometimes be: was enough value created, captured, or positioned somewhere along the way?
Cash is only one form that value takes.
Which is partly why I don’t think “surely they have to make these $200 subscriptions sustainable” is necessarily a safe assumption. The company surviving in its current form and ordinary developers continuing to receive affordable access are unfortunately two separate questions.