Thread

GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

1066 points · 953 comments · crorella

Aboutplants · 1790703271 · focus · HN ↗
“OpenAI's new Pro 500 plan offers OpenAI's highest usage allowance and comes with access to its new "Ultrafast" feature — it also costs $500 per month.
At the same time, OpenAI is also making its existing $200 Pro plan less appealing. In Codex and Work, $200 Pro subscribers will see their included usage decrease from 20x of what the company offers to Plus users, down to 10x of that same allowance. In ChatGPT, meanwhile, GPT-6 Pro message caps will decrease from 200 to 100 per week.”
<a href="https://www.engadget.com/2272106/openai-adds-dollar500-pro-subscription-nerfs-its-existing-dollar200-tier/" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/2272106/openai-adds-dollar500-pro-s...
Yikes
1. surgical_fire · 1790704061 · focus · HN ↗
  OpenAI is deeply unprofitable, particularly on those pro plans.
  The only way is for prices to go up. Way up.
  1. mrtesthah · 1790705083 · focus · HN ↗
    It really does look like OpenAI is trying to gradually get rid of their subscription plans. Every week there is noticeably less usage available to them while each new model release boasts substantially cheaper API token pricing. If this continues then the two pricing models will eventually be at parity.
    surgical_fire · 1790712081 · focus · HN ↗
    The subscription plans are a huge money sink, that obviously will have to go away or be priced at a ridiculous level to make sense.
    machomaster · 1790717954 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not true at all, at the most fundamental level. There is a reason why all the businesses (IT, gyms, cars, restaurants, streaming services, music, games, stores, apps, food delivery, magazines, newspapers, shaving blades, parfume, etc) are doing everything in their to get subscribers and are willing to decrease prices in order to get customers who are paying the monthly (or even better, a yearly) fee.
    surgical_fire · 1790721377 · focus · HN ↗
    This is delusional.
    The cost of providing the tokens for a heavy user (and let's be frank, the people paying $200 are likely heavy users) is many, many times more than the $200 recurring revenue they generate.
    machomaster · 1790777623 · focus · HN ↗
    Let's be frank, you don't know what you are talking about.
    Deepseek has low prices and despite that their profit margin at the beginning of this year was a whooping 82.9%. Since then, they have significantly raised prices.
    You can actually check the approx. financials of OpenAI and Anthropic. The growth is insane.
    There is no reason to believe why OAI/Anthropic wouldn't have a much better profit margin than DS, taking into account a much higher prices.
    surgical_fire · 1790788973 · focus · HN ↗
    rofl, and I am the one that doesn't know what he is talking about.
    > Deepseek has low prices and despite that their profit margin at the beginning of this year was a whooping 82.9%. Since then, they have significantly raised prices.
    DeepSeek increased prices substantially not long ago. I find their profit margins hard to inspect considering I have very little idea what sort of environment they may get in China (from cheaper energy to government subsidies). I honestly doubt you have any insight here as well.
    > You can actually check the approx. financials of OpenAI and Anthropic.
    No you can't. They are not publicly traded, and they constantly and selectively leak bullshit metrics, from extremely unclear ARR, to extremely deceiving EBITDA. You willingly eat their bullshit and call me a picky eater in return.
    > There is no reason to believe why OAI/Anthropic wouldn't have a much better profit margin than DS, taking into account a much higher prices.
    I see no reason to believe (much less any actual evidence) that OAI or Anthropic have any path to profitability.
    If inference (particularly for subscriptions) was in anyway as profitable as you claim today, they wouldn't need private investment rounds like crazy nor they would be desperate to offload this hot potato in an IPO.
    82% margins lol. Are you telling me that if you created a machine that turns 1 dollar in 5 what you would do is dillute your ownership of the machine instead of using these fabulous profits to expand the business?
    machomaster · 1790811068 · focus · HN ↗
    Further proof of my previous verdict...
    It's clear that you are out of your depth when it comes to financials, business economics or a simple "what it takes to run a business".
    You need money to make money. Growth strategy vs. self-financing strategy, pros and cons, when to do each. Critical chain. Limiting factor in infrastructure. Will not expand because this already goes over your head.
    surgical_fire · 1790815008 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and apparently they need several trillions of revenue to make the investments make any sense.
    I'm not the one out of my depth here.
    Feel free to have the last word. I prefer to read idiocy in homeopatic doses.
2. moregrist · 1790704089 · focus · HN ↗
  This is pretty typical product positioning. You want to sell to both high-end and low-end users, so you offer products at a few price points. Then it turns out that that middle is a much better fit for most users. So you start making the middle a worse fit to push most of those users into the higher tiers.
  Long term, this only works if you have a non-commodity, and if the higher tier is actually more profitable. We'll eventually learn whether both are true. For OpenAI right now, it's probably enough to just increase revenue, even if the higher tier is even less profitable.
  1. 5555watch · 1790704975 · focus · HN ↗
    The 200$ plan was appealing because you got 4x usage for 2x the price.
    Now, as it's linear, it makes much more sense to downgrade to 100$ OAI and pick up a 100$ Claude sub. (without doing the numbers) the usage should remain the same, total paid the same, but having access to best of both worlds. It should be a win for the user, and a loss for OAI.
    With this in mind, it sounds like a fumble by OAI.
    jpadkins · 1790708650 · focus · HN ↗
    This is what I did. Hope it works out. The other benefit is you have a more natural method to avoid lock in. A lot of "improvements" to the agent harness I believe are attempts to build customer lock in.
    RussianCow · 1790727065 · focus · HN ↗
    > it sounds like a fumble by OAI.
    The vast majority of their revenue comes from large businesses buying for their teams, which are almost certainly not going to juggle lower tiers of different subscriptions to save a few bucks.
    nananana9 · 1790748504 · focus · HN ↗
    If we're heading to a world where AI spending for companies will be close to salary spending - which is questionable, but is the only way future in which OAI/Anthropic survive - you will most certainly have people whose full-time job it is to juggle providers and figure out how to save a few percent this month.
    5555watch · 1790792948 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe. But developers are also private people who will also play with their private subs and projects. In my opinion, their private experience might influence some corporate level decisions.
    Being grandfathered by OAI and happy is not the same as having both, and noticing "hmm maybe Claude is much better for my case, Ill suggest that to our manager"
    RussianCow · 1790966502 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. TomGarden · 1790704100 · focus · HN ↗
  They're really (finally?) starting to behave like a company bleeding money.
  Our VC-backed subscription days are numbered
  1. [deleted] · 1790704349 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. m3kw9 · 1790704874 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm ok with whatever price they give out given they are not a monopoly and have competition, the lock in is minimum for me. This means they have legit reasons to send us this price plan. I don't believe they would shoot themselves in the foot when there is cut throat competition (Claude/opensource) out there.
    Lastly, I'd like to actually use it in the real world to see how far my plan goes or if its unusable.
  3. glaslong · 1790704911 · focus · HN ↗
    Alas, I did enjoy burning investor money on my taxis, movies and tokens.
  4. onlyrealcuzzo · 1790709821 · focus · HN ↗
    > Our VC-backed subscription days are numbered
    Well, the time it takes to compress frontier intelligence down to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs (basically too cheap to meter) is dropping, and the differential between the two is also dropping...
    So... who cares?
4. honkycat · 1790704150 · focus · HN ↗
  Wow, canceling my sub. Lets see how Claude is doing these days.
  I can justify $200/mo but more than double is not appealing to me.
  1. WinstonSmith84 · 1790704455 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, here is a breaking-news for you: the 20x from Claude is not a 20x on the weekly usage, it's a 20x on the 5h usage, while the weekly usage is simply double the $100 plan...
    Basically OpenAI aligned with Anthropic on the weekly usage with the caveat that OpenAI doesn't have a 5h limit.
    diffuse_l · 1790705004 · focus · HN ↗
    OpenAI 20x wasn't 20x even before that change. I got a lot more from Claude 5x than Codex 20x...
    spiderice · 1790705131 · focus · HN ↗
    You are literally completely flipping reality. Codex was, in fact, 20x. It was Claude that was not 20x until they got caught.
    diffuse_l · 1790705957 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm describing what I got from 20x Codex vs Claude 5x. Codex is just not worth the money, at least for me. What's flipped is the value you get for each of those
    cmrdporcupine · 1790705133 · focus · HN ↗
    "For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations. " - Dario a couple weeks ago.
    Yes, he was talking about safety, but IMHO they're likely already IMHO pushing the boundaries of cartel type behaviour. And they will use safety as the cover to make it happen.
    I suspect we'll see serious price fixing and the DOJ do nothing about it because of the inroads these people have with the Trump regime.
    enraged_camel · 1790705252 · focus · HN ↗
    You are painting half of the picture, perhaps on purpose? The other half is this: Opus 5.5 is significantly better than both Sol 6.1 and Astra, and with the newly increased limits across the board, it is quite difficult to run out (unless you're spamming agents at Max effort). So it is a much, much better deal than OpenAI's Pro 100.
    WinstonSmith84 · 1790705645 · focus · HN ↗
    > Opus 5.5 is significantly better than (..) Sol 6.1
    Come on .. this is barely released and you can already make that assessment?
    And no, the $200 Anthropic plan is not significantly better than the $200 OpenAI plan, it's just the same Marketing non-sense and anybody shall now rather stick to the $100 plan of both of these provider if the monthly budget is $200. Anthropic doesn't have a Luna Max equivalent, and frankly Sol 6.1 is yet to be thoroughly tested.
    [deleted] · 1790708261 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    MCArth · 1790705257 · focus · HN ↗
    If you've used both you know the OpenAI plans don't compare to Anthropic plans _at all_. Claude code subscriptions are probably worth 4x as much in API spend compared to the same OpenAI subscription tier.
    nostrebored · 1790710350 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you have probably started using OpenAI recently -- one draw used to be that it was really, really hard to ever hit limits. If you did, you probably had usage resets available.
    I think this is still true provided you're not using Astra.
    machomaster · 1790717469 · focus · HN ↗
    The shitty thing about OpenAI's resets is that, unlike Anthropic, they also reset the limit (on the next natural weekly reset). It means that of you pushed the reset button 5 days into the week, you only get 2 days' (2/7 of weekly) worth of extra tokens.
    cromka · 1790761583 · focus · HN ↗
    Most recent two resets were banked?
    machomaster · 1790811836 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, as I mentioned as well.
    An example. Let's assume that the work is evenly divided between days.
    Imagine you want to work twice as much.
    1. How efficiently can you use the reset credits if they would not reset the normal reset time?
    Work with your normal weekly quota 3.5 days, press reset, work with new tokens for the rest of the week. Efficiency 100%.
    2. With natural reset time going forward 7 days after each artificial reset.
    You work for 3.5 days, press the reset, work for 3.5 days, wait for another 3.5 days for the natural reset, work for 3.5 days, press manual reset, work for 3.5 days, wait for 3.5 days... You can calculate the number for decreased efficiency yourself.
    cromka · 1790851614 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh right, I missed your point. Yeah I guess those resets are only for when your workload required you to use all the allowance before end of week. Then you reset and are back to fresh "regular" (non-overloaded) week. But I agree it would be nicer if it worked like you wish.
    andriy_koval · 1790713075 · focus · HN ↗
    people say this, but I am wondering if there is benchmark/dashboard which actually measures this?
    the_duke · 1790708608 · focus · HN ↗
    It used to be bad, but right now with the 200$ Claude sub I find it pretty hard to blow past the session limit.
    You have to do a lot of things in parallel.
    InsideOutSanta · 1790709790 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, Fable is essentially unusable, it just burns through quota, but Opus 5.5 is great. The $200 plan goes a long way.
  2. spiderice · 1790705089 · focus · HN ↗
    > According to the company, existing subscribers will keep their current limits for a time, and will later receive a one-time credit to help them make the most of their new reduced allowances
    Might want to hold off on canceling and continue to bleed them dry until the nerf hits
    honkycat · 1790715968 · focus · HN ↗
    I just got an email telling me this isn't true. They're immediately cutting my 200, which I've had for like a year.
5. torginus · 1790704798 · focus · HN ↗
  I think that's by design - they're going to IPO soon so if they can get a significant percentage of users to switch from the $200 to the $500, they can 2.5x projected revenue.
  1. adonese · 1790704932 · focus · HN ↗
    Very risky to do so especially considering how well is opus 5.5.
    scottLobster · 1790705110 · focus · HN ↗
    You think these guys care about risk?
    cromka · 1790761446 · focus · HN ↗
    Their investors do
  2. glub · 1790705290 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, that's not going to happen. They are more likely to lose a lot of customers, unless Anthropic does the same thing.
    But $200 is likely the ceiling of what people will pay for a subscription with usage based on vibes.
    latentsea · 1790705735 · focus · HN ↗
    For consumers they may as well buy GPUs and run local models. The cost is same over a year or two but infinite token usage, they get to keep the hardware, and local models continue to improve over that time too. I can't justify $200 on SOTA models for a personal subscription after Qwen3.8-27B. And it's only getting better from here.
    glub · 1790706359 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, either US AI corps reduce the cost of their top tier personal subscriptions down to what people are already paying for other expensive personal apps (e.g. Adobe), so ~$50-100, or open weights are going to eat their lunch very quickly. We're not there yet, as current hardware doesn't allow you to do things like multiple parallel agents, but we'll get there soon enough.
    $500 for the old $200 is definitely a fumble.
    latentsea · 1790707446 · focus · HN ↗
    I have multiple GPUs now as a way to solve that.
    rrvsh · 1790728594 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely you realize how rare the ability to do this is
    latentsea · 1790738023 · focus · HN ↗
    I do not. I had 1 GPU and I had an expensive subscription. I simply cancelled it, and purchased a second figuring if I was going to spend the money anyway I'd rather have something to show for it at the end of the day. I'm not unique or special in my capability to do this. I figure I may as well purchase at least one GPU per year equivalent to what I would have spent on SOTA model subscriptions for that given year.
    RussianCow · 1790726815 · focus · HN ↗
    People keep saying this but it's just patently not true, or at least not apples-to-apples. You can't seriously compare Qwen 3.8 27B to Fable or Astra. Even if local models get better, so will the frontier, and you'll always be at a disadvantage.
    Unless you're talking about buying enough hardware to run something like GLM 5.3, in which case the math just doesn't pencil out—the break even point is several years, and you're stuck with hardware that will be outdated well before then.
    There are plenty of good reasons to use local models, but none of them are financial, at least for the vast majority of users.
    latentsea · 1790727552 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't need SOTA. You need a model that can accomplish your task. Qwen3.8-27B isn't comparable to SOTA, but can I use it and accomplish most of my tasks with? Yup.
    The optimal move is to retain the minimal access to SOTA models on the $20 plan, and for anything your local model fails at, use SOTA as the backup for either planning or debugging.
    This way you're not actually at any disadvantage in terms of capability. You also don't need an advantage, you need to complete the tasks you care about. Eyes on the prize.
    RTX 3090 came out a long time ago and it may be 'outdated' at this point but still banging like a champ for anyone who bought one and becoming increasingly more capable as new models unlock it's potential. Hardware hasn't changed much, but what it can do certainly has.
    RussianCow · 1790791119 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    seizethecheese · 1790711866 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    glub · 1790712197 · focus · HN ↗
    > People said the same about $200 a month
    This is missing an important context. And I actually remember this well, because I was saying that too. And the reason I was saying is that $200 plan didn't come with API usage, it was a chat plan.
    It made no sense up until they started including API usage. Just as $500 makes no sense now.
    seizethecheese · 1790712745 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    glub · 1790712891 · focus · HN ↗
    You could only use it on chatgpt.com
    Now you can use it in coding harnesses that call the API.
    kadushka · 1790771053 · focus · HN ↗
    Just as $500 makes no sense now
    Why? You can use in codex, right?
  3. Computer0 · 1790717252 · focus · HN ↗
    I am skeptical that individuals on the $200 and $500 plans make up that meaningful of a portion of revenue.
    kadushka · 1790771160 · focus · HN ↗
    They use a meaningful portion of compute.
6. ndbe · 1790704820 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
7. LeBit · 1790704950 · focus · HN ↗
  Let’s pray Chinese models are not banned.
  1. Madmallard · 1790709855 · focus · HN ↗
    how could u even ban them? lol
    girvo · 1790713610 · focus · HN ↗
    Same way they’ve banned a lot of Chinese networking hardware: make it impossible for companies to use it.
    killingtime74 · 1790717298 · focus · HN ↗
    anyone can run it on their own laptop
    ricericerice · 1790722980 · focus · HN ↗
    got a link to a laptop that can run K3?
    killingtime74 · 1790745563 · focus · HN ↗
    I got lots of links to models you can run on a laptop.
    girvo · 1790730642 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn’t help you when your laptop is a corporate one.
    cromka · 1790761368 · focus · HN ↗
    Meanwhile Huawei is doing just fine everywhere else
8. latentsea · 1790705522 · focus · HN ↗
  At $500 per month, it's cheaper to just buy GPUs and use local models.
  1. tripleee · 1790706225 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you looked at the prices of GPUs lately?
    latentsea · 1790707261 · focus · HN ↗
    Yup. I got an R9700 recently for exactly this reason. Figured if I'm going to spend $2400 a year I may as well have something to show for it at the end of it.
    That they are expensive and climbing doesn't negate my point if the cost of the subscription over how long you plan to keep it is equally or more expensive than the GPUs. You can put together dual 5060 Ti or 5070 Ti systems to run local LLMs too. You don't need to splurge on a 5090. That's a bad option at this point.
    tripleee · 1790708620 · focus · HN ↗
    What models are you running locally? Are you banking on them improving or do you think they're good enough today? 32GB of VRAM there wouldn't be close to enough to run the best local models.
    I've messed around with Qwen3.6-27B but I'm not sure if it could yet even replace Luna for me.
    latentsea · 1790728687 · focus · HN ↗
    Qwen3.8-27B is a huge step up from Qwen3.6-27B. That release only happened relatively recently but that felt like the 'Opus 4.5' release turning point that SOTA models experienced back when that came out. It was the first time I felt like local models are actually good enough to use as daily drivers now. So, it was only after that point that I switched.
    Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is better still if you can run fast enough. If you have a dual R9700 setup you certainly can. That model is even better.
    Qwen4-27B has been announced but not released yet. I'm super pumped for it because I already use 3.8 as my daily driver at home for all my personal stuff, so I'm definitely happy to take an increase in capability.
    There is clearly still room for improvement in local models on consumer hardware. With the Qwen 27B models, If you have at least a 5070 Ti I think you can get away with running a small Q4 quant if you use KV cache streaming. The 24GB cards can run Q4 comfortably. If you have a 32B card you can run Q6 comfortably. If you have 48GB ~ 64GB of VRAM you can Q8 comfortably. Using llama.cpp Vulkan let's you pool VRAM across cards (even AMD and NVIDIA etc), so my machine has a 5060 Ti and an R9700.
    A dual R9700 rig is really the sweet spot right now with the vLLM-radiance fork. If you can swing a 5070 Ti in there as well to retain some CUDA access, then all the better. That's basically the equivalent to spending 2 years on a subscription, but gets you a system that can run Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next and of course the even more capable Qwen4-Flash when it releases. At the end of the two years it'll run even better models I'm sure.
    I'm all in on local now.
    directdev · 1790900145 · focus · HN ↗
    Hey! your comment here stood out to me. I'm researching AI coding plan limits and costs, not selling anything.
    Would you be up for a 20-minute chat about your experience, or a few lines by email?
9. user43928 · 1790706401 · focus · HN ↗
  Unfortunate that the Ultrafast is only available with the $500 subscription.
  Tibo said that the existing $200 subscriptions keep the 20x factor for a while.
  Ultrafast would have been nice with the temporary "Pro 400" plan.
  1. cactusplant7374 · 1790708356 · focus · HN ↗
    Ultrafast uses 6x the usage. They probably realize that people will complain if the plan limits are too low. In any case, the TCO of the newer chips is supposedly lower. Hopefully everyone is on ultrafast eventually.

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