How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.
On what tokens? The ones of today's model, or tomorrow's?
The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.
Are you serious? If you used 10$ of your subscription until 10th of month and then prices changed, well, the rest of your subscription uses new prices, that's basic math.
First, I wouldn't put it past OpenAI to charge even if your prompt triggered the guardrails, transferring responsibility is their style.
Second, how does vague billing prevent someone from mapping the "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" style of responses to map the guardrails?
I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.
What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…
Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math" rel="nofollow">https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math
For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.
If it’s small percentage then you could spend just that few dollars in API costs or lower subscription and the rest is profit. So you're not saving anything, just reclassifying that opportunity cost to feel better about your subscription’s value. I know it's pedantic but it's useful to be aware of opportunity cost trying to trick us.
Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.
I try to do the same thing, but I just don't see these very large savings. I can't even really justify the $200 or $100 tier off of it. I usually can match it immediately or beat it with just some brief Googling. I simply don't think the price arbitrage just really exists in any reliable way, month to month. Its more of a bonus if it happens to work out.
My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings:
- Two one-way flights
- New OLED 55"- 65" TV
- Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs
- Expensive, specialized medical device
- Variety of car parts
I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.
Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.
I'd rather use the fancy models while absurd valuations are subsidising them and then pick up a couple grand worth of their old hardware in a few years when they're eol.
Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
Jerry: How is it a write-off?
Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
Jerry: Write it off what?
Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
Jerry: You don't even know what a write-off is.
Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
Jerry: No, I don't.
Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.
Edit to be fair: the "500 minus tax write off" comment does make sense but often people overstates the benefits of writing things off.
I had no idea that was originally from seinfeld! The Schitts Creek version: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ&t=26s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ&t=26s
I've talked to VP at my company and we both agreed $1000 for the time saved, is still 'worth it'.
Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.
I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.
I mean, it's a good deal for the boss, but I also wouldn't want to waste two years of my life doing something I could do in a couple months or weeks, would you? That's not a good use of my life, regardless of whether someone's willing to pay me.
My take - the $500/month is likely similar to the $200/month plan (albeit with Astra Ultrafast that consumes tokens ultrafast).
Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:
Maybe me: “you’re charging $500/month for what was $200/month earlier”
Maybe OAI: “no we’re not!! You get *more* tokens than the older $200/month plan and did you hear, you get Astra Ultrafast access!”
Maybe me: “oh really? How many more tokens??”
Maybe OAI: “I’m sorry we can no longer share that information, it’s confidential. National security and all…”
More than an hour after I wrote this, OAI sent an email sounding eerily close to my approximation:
- $500 plan comes with not 20x,
but 25x allowance!
- also Astro Ultraspeed
- $200 pulled down to 10x quota
Things I hadn’t anticipated:
- one time ~62,000 credit
top-up ($2,500 API call
value)
- 5 hour quota limits removed
The removal of 5 hourly quotas can negate some reduction in token allowance. Especially relevant for those of us working in 2-3 day bursts (such as weekends). Because these folks weren’t using their full weekly quota before, they already had a decent buffer.
Maybe OAI thinks people are creating new unnecessary work to use their allowance completely. Well they aren’t entirely wrong. But the experimentation has been useful in letting us discover new use-cases, and to develop and flex our agentic muscles.
As a consumer paying $20 now to chatGPT where i hit those gauntlet usage messages then using Muse a lot and not receiving any such messages. Im questioning my $20 a month GPT subscription and my $5 a month Gemini (Google has enough money as Meta to make it free) subscription.
Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!
Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.
If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. It's like gmail is free, but Google is harvesting all of my data to sell me ads. Meta is doing the same with Muse.
You can use open weights models right now and ignore all this fuss. And by the time open weights models are objectively and subjectively on par with what Fable/Astra are today, the frontier labs will probably offer something newer, more capable and more expensive. The models OpenAI and Anthropic roll out clearly aren’t for people on a strict budget.
Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?
Lalabadie · · focus · HN ↗
boredatoms · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
MisterMunchkin · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.
rebolek · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
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schaefer · · focus · HN ↗
And if they do that accurately, there's no stopping someone from mapping the guard rails.
Clearly that outcome is more uncomfortable than what we have now, which is enough people seem to be okay with vague billing.
cousinbryce · · focus · HN ↗
RandomGerm4n · · focus · HN ↗
ASalazarMX · · focus · HN ↗
Second, how does vague billing prevent someone from mapping the "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" style of responses to map the guardrails?
CSMastermind · · focus · HN ↗
Just trust me bro accounting.
cyanydeez · · focus · HN ↗
rafram · · focus · HN ↗
Xcelerate · · focus · HN ↗
FrinkleFrankle · · focus · HN ↗
sillyfluke · · focus · HN ↗
datsci_est_2015 · · focus · HN ↗
Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math" rel="nofollow">https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math
Xcelerate · · focus · HN ↗
I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.
rafram · · focus · HN ↗
CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?
Or does it just refuse to try?
tevon · · focus · HN ↗
Xcelerate · · focus · HN ↗
deno · · focus · HN ↗
jkingsman · · focus · HN ↗
qingcharles · · focus · HN ↗
I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day.
How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?
lavezzi · · focus · HN ↗
cityofdelusion · · focus · HN ↗
My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings: - Two one-way flights - New OLED 55"- 65" TV - Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs - Expensive, specialized medical device - Variety of car parts
I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.
ValentineC · · focus · HN ↗
That would limit the $500 plan to smaller businesses.
a851c8a96264c · · focus · HN ↗
dpweb · · focus · HN ↗
Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.
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Insanity · · focus · HN ↗
dillondoyle · · focus · HN ↗
dpweb · · focus · HN ↗
avgDev · · focus · HN ↗
Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.
I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.
bobocop · · focus · HN ↗
Gets to put you under pressure to deliver more while paying you less. A few months you say, why not weeks? I'm sure the latest model can do it.
Also, forget about those "easy" ideas, if you are not on the verge of burnout every day you might as well not be working.
ericd · · focus · HN ↗
zeroonetwothree · · focus · HN ↗
sheepscreek · · focus · HN ↗
Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:
sheepscreek · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe OAI thinks people are creating new unnecessary work to use their allowance completely. Well they aren’t entirely wrong. But the experimentation has been useful in letting us discover new use-cases, and to develop and flex our agentic muscles.
paul7986 · · focus · HN ↗
Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!
Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.
abirch · · focus · HN ↗
Razengan · · focus · HN ↗
chrsw · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?
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rebolek · · focus · HN ↗
seshagiric · · focus · HN ↗
I think this is the first instance where it means you are actually paying 500$