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. 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.

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