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Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by paxys on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:39PM (#49600853)
People should realize by now that they aren't giving out thousands of dollars worth of compute in a $20 subscription out of the goodness of their hearts. The base level plans aren't meant for any kind of serious work beyond the equivalent of Google searches. At best treat it like a trial.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by solenoid0937 on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:49PM (#49600957)
I hope everyone recognized the cheap tokens as a transparent ploy to gain more users before jacking up prices. This was obvious from day one.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by skybrian on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:17PM (#49601262)
Your cheap cynicism makes OpenAI's lower prices sound like a reason to avoid using them, but that's backwards! It's a better strategy to use them now while prices are low and switch later if necessary. Nobody knows who will have the best prices later, so better to decide later.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by NewJazz on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:20PM (#49601940)
Only if switching costs are low. If you are investing in the platform and integrating deeply, then planning to switch may not be a good plan.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by cj on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:21PM (#49601303)
It’s good to be aware when you’re buying something that’s subsidized. No need to downplay the importance of awareness.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by skybrian on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:26PM (#49601362)
Aware of what, though? We don't actually know OpenAI's profit margins on inference. Do we need to know?

It's enough to know that the market is competitive and new models with better prices are released often. This means you should have a way to switch models.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by cj on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:50PM (#49601627)
The entire market is subsided more than it is competitive. The market wouldn’t exist the same as it does today if it weren’t being propped up. Thats the point.

I remember the days when I had a $2000+ credit balance on Uber because I mastered their referral program. “Free” uber blacks for 2 years!

When you’re using free shit that you should probably be paying more for, it’s good to not fool yourself.

In the Uber example, the fact that Lyft also existed at the time didn’t matter to me as someone happily riding around the city in Uber Black for $0. Unfortunately Lyft’s referral program wasn’t so lucrative so I couldn’t switch…

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by fgkramer on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:15PM (#49601897)
How does this work with inference providers behind OpenRouter? Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by cj on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:53PM (#49602287)
> Are you saying that all of them are actually losing money?

Are you saying these companies are operating on anything resembling a sustainable business model?

I think not!

If OpenAI needs to impose 5 hour limits during a time where they are aggressively trying to grow market share, what do you think they (or whatever the winning provider is) will do in 5 years once they IPO and need to boost margins?

They won’t be as friendly with usage caps as they’re being now.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by thejazzman on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:00PM (#49602953)
`needs to impose 5 hour limits ` I'm no OpenAI defender but that's like saying Apple is going bankrupt because they charge for their products. Why wouldn't they do everything they can to turn $20 users into $200 users?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by solenoid0937 on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @01:52AM (#49605982)
Exactly. It is common knowledge that all the AI companies have terrible margins. IMO tokens are the cheapest they'll ever be as these companies compete for users.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by qlte on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:27PM (#49601999)
To the extent that the 3rd party inference resellers are a viable market because of Chinese/certain US AI labs (current) willingness to absorb substantial compute/R&D/data harvesting costs while releasing weights on permissive licensing terms for free, then yes, current pricing is distorted.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by stymaar on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:25PM (#49601984)
Where can I sign up for a monthly subscription on OpenRouter instead of paying the real API price?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by cuttothechase on Monday September 07, 2026 @04:06PM (#49602427)
Openrouter is not so open as well, right? They take the middle man cut by enforcing their own limit restrictions and 429s on top of the model provided limit restrictions and what not.

Now why would I pay a middle man anything if I can get the same hosted model without their own whimsical service limits?

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by skybrian on Monday September 07, 2026 @06:44PM (#49603817)
Uber isn't a good comparison. LLMs are a national or global market, not a local one. Also: already driverless.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by solenoid0937 on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:55PM (#49602305)
Aware that the rug will be pulled. The market runs at a loss
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by MikhailTal on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:52PM (#49601659)
Aware that this is essentially a soon to be deprecated service. As any vendor you need to know the life expectancy of it, plus forecast/predict any pricing changes. You really do not want to become dependent. Even if competitors exist, there still some non trivial cost to switch
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by skybrian on Monday September 07, 2026 @06:41PM (#49603797)
My cost to switch is choosing a different model from a pulldown menu.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by rgbrgb on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:03PM (#49601784)
agree and underscores the idea that you should keep your setups portable between model providers by using external memory systems and connector gateways
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by fny on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:57PM (#49601051)
I hope everyone recognizes they aim to make you dependent on their intelligence rather than your own.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by gruez on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:20PM (#49601298)
But there's open models that are (pessimistically) 1 year behind? It's not like if openai decided to rugpull everyone, we'd be going back to writing code by hand and all the developers who forgot how to fizzbuzz would be screwed.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by benterix on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:01PM (#49601755)
> we'd be going back to writing code by hand

Well, as as SWE who writes code by hand and has no intention to outsource their intelligence to any entity, I felt slightly offended by "back".

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nightski on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:09PM (#49601848)
Are you a member of a team? Then you are the outsourced intelligence. Your manager is not writing everything by hand, they are outsourcing it to you. Just understand that may change (I mean I am already mentally prepared for it to be a thing of the past within years). If you are purely writing software for hobby/fun then disregard, nothing will stop you from doing that.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by benterix on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:23AM (#49609358)
I have no problem with other people outsourcing their intelligence to me, I've been doing this for years. But I prefer not to outsource my intelligence, at least not for things I care about, for various reasons.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nightski on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @02:32PM (#49614639)
Do you use an operating system? What about databases? Or the myriad of other software used which we build upon. I can't imagine a professional coding context where we don't outsource intelligence to some degree, if not a major degree. We stand on the shoulders of giants as they say.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by benterix on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:50AM (#49640502)
It's not a problem at all. It's only for the things I care about and I consider important for a couple of reasons (maintaining and developing mental models etc.).
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dgellow on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:58PM (#49601724)
Open weight models are way closer to frontiers than that
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ghostly_s on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:26PM (#49601350)
Open models still need compute.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:39PM (#49601492)
Open AI rents compute. It seems unlikely given the huge investments they have already spent that they can profitably match someone who is just selling GPU time.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by fny on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:22PM (#49603125)
An open model is not your brain.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by zulux on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:11PM (#49601191)
There's an escape valve: I've had Claude stand-up AI-enabled features in my app, so we're much less dependent on Claude itself. The app uses cheap API calls to check code quality and run other "lessons learned" sweeps. Some of these become regular code in the end as well.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by vidarh on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:35PM (#49601449)
Same. Claude "loves" writing tools to make checks deterministic so much that I actually have to pull it back sometimes and point out that some things need to keep using LLMs. But even then, I have it "farm out" a lot of things to scripts using dirt-cheap models for things I don't need a Sonnet or higher level model for as well. The proportion that runs on the SOTA models keeps dropping.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by catchnear4321 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:01PM (#49601091)
I reject your intelligence and substitute my own?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by flir on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:57PM (#49601056)
Or more efficient models/faster hardware close the gap between here and profitability.

I wouldn't be surprised if every $10 you add to the subscription cost halves your audience.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by mrweasel on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:59PM (#49601738)
That boils down to who the customers for ChatGPT really are. $10 isn't going to make a difference for those who already pay, because they are basically pro-consumers. OpenAI might deliver enterprise solutions for large companies, but those deals are besides the per month subscriptions on the website.

For ChatGPT I really only see two customer groups, pro-consumer and small and medium enterprise. The entry level are just going to use Google/Gemini for the most part, or some ad supported ChatGPT tier. There's no price low enough to make the entry level, average consumer pay for an AI service. These are people who will not pay for search, email and social media. They only pay for streaming because there's no way around it.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by flir on Monday September 07, 2026 @04:30PM (#49602673)
Ok half was an exaggeration, but I think $10 might make quite a lot of them jump to Claude. Or DeepSeek. Remember, we're talking about a global user base here.

I settled on GPT Plus/Codex for my own work, while my employer settled on Claude on Bedrock (where I am, according to their metrics, using about $20 of compute a day, so I can believe that GPT Plus is a loss-leader). If I hit too many 5-hour timeouts I'm not jumping to Pro I'm jumping to Claude.

(Funnily enough, I just hit one. It'll reset in... three hours. I wasn't even hammering it, just writing some tests. I think I'm gonna just go reactivate my Anthropic account for a month).

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by mrweasel on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @03:22AM (#49606707)
I'd agree that $10 can and will make users switch to a different provider. Just as streaming music services are all price basically the same, as to avoid users just jumping to the cheapest, I think the AI companies will find a suitable price point for consumer AI. After that they'll just settle into a system where when one raise or lower their price, the rest will follow.

Those who benefit from using and LLM will continue to pay for one, regardless of provider, regardless of the price being $20 or $50.

The global aspect is interesting, because $50 is a lot of money for most of the global population. The AI advocates claim to be getting more hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of value from their subscription. In the poorest countries that should make an even greater difference, but that assumes that they can get those first $50 and that the value is actually being generated.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ForOldHack on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:33PM (#49603195)
Your intelligence is good, but mine is better. They could easily raise their prices until their user base falls to zero, and the offer steep discounts, but then... so could everybody else. We need to pimp all the speculators until they are bankrupt. Welcome to web 4.0b. "We will bury you."
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by TuxSH on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:47PM (#49601588)
It was obvious indeed, but damn does it feel good to have ridden the May 25 - Aug. 26 gravy train.

Now, let's see how the Anthropic IPO goes.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by edoceo on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:57PM (#49601713)
I'm going to predict: soft, below first-trade price at 180d from IPO date.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by password54321 on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:52PM (#49600990)
It is really about data. The endgame is not about hoping devs give them money.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by mrweasel on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:39PM (#49601486)
What are they going to do with that data? Is it ads again?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by password54321 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:43PM (#49601543)
You are about to get replaced.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by mrweasel on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:13PM (#49601882)
Probably not, but I can channel my inner Scotty Fairno https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUbMs8Vipp5/
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by solenoid0937 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:45PM (#49601567)
That's happening anyways, they don't need more organic data for that.

Also, who cares? Such is the price of progress, I'm not selfish enough to hold humanity back because "muh job"

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by password54321 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:47PM (#49601597)
That's great. We are obviously both privileged enough to think that. Not so great for others.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by solenoid0937 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:48PM (#49601612)
They'll get through it. You don't just halt progress because the transition will be rough. We'd be pre-industrial if we thought like this.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by copperx on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:21PM (#49601311)
More data isn't helping much, if Astra is any indication.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by password54321 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:42PM (#49601525)
This is just you putting your head in the sand while you gradually automate your job.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by flir on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:45PM (#49601561)
I've spent my entire career trying to automate my job.

(I get what you're trying to say, I'm just finding the irony amusing).

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by madaxe_again on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:19PM (#49601276)
Or to just give users enough usage to find categories in which it is useful for them.

I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dgellow on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:00PM (#49601747)
you’re using an LLM as your international accountant? And brag about it online? That’s definitely a choice
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by brazukadev on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:52PM (#49600988)
As long as there is no path to profitability going from subsidized to fully paid tokens we are making them lose money.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by tehjoker on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:23PM (#49601327)
This is not entirely true, you are costing them in the short run, but are growing your dependence on their product and feeding them training data.

Their goal is to create AGI and replace humans with something resembling the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel but more extreme.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by brazukadev on Saturday September 12, 2026 @02:22PM (#49675419)
That's their goal but if they fail we got LLMs "for free".
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by geraldwhen on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:55PM (#49601027)
They won’t be able to. Open models exist and run on a Mac you can buy now or in October.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by howdareme9 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:04PM (#49601130)
please point me to an open model, that matches astra even on low reasoning, and runs on a mac
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dwaite on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:12PM (#49601875)
Why would it need to match Astra?

Software companies don't give up and fold because they can't hire one of the five best engineers in the world.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by taylorfinley on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:40PM (#49601508)
No problem, but you'll need to wait a few months
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by 7bit on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @05:40AM (#49623757)
What kind of nonsense argument is this
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by apparent on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:00PM (#49601084)
The audience for this sort of thing is currently quite limited. It may grow more in the future, especially if prices get out of control, but for now, it's a relatively small subset of people.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by esskay on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:08PM (#49601168)
Sorry but this is a pretty delusional take. No, you cant run the same level or even close to that level of model on a mac, not even on a 512gb studio. You can run good models sure, but not models anywhere close to the capabilities of these ones yet, despite what idiots on Twitter keep spouting.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by andybak on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:30PM (#49601397)
The "run locally" thing is a red herring. The fact that anyone can be an inference providers and offer them as a service is what we need to focus on. If they are "good enough" then market forces will stop Anthropic/OpenAI from charging monopoly rents.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by leros on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:42PM (#49601532)
The $100 plans are plenty for me to use nearly all day. I'm using between $1500-3000 worth of tokens a month via those plans.

I definitely see the pricing model. I can afford $100, maybe $200, but not $3000.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by worldsavior on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:06PM (#49601161)
I thought it was always about us being the RL. We pay less because they use our usage to train their models.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by rfgplk on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:36PM (#49601458)
> People should realize by now that they aren't giving out thousands of dollars worth of compute in a $20 subscription out of the goodness of their hearts. The base level plans aren't meant for any kind of serious work beyond the equivalent of Google searches. At best treat it like a trial.

I've said this countless times already; if OpenAI or Anthropic were serious about world domination they would offer an infinite $500 to $1000/month tier subscription. No limits; eat as much as you'd like buffet. Maybe limit concurrent connection (say 10 conns max in parallel) to limit abuse. This would actually allow regular users to run 24/7 agentic loops, massively speeding up deployment. Win win for everyone.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dwaite on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:24PM (#49601970)
The business model works by over provisioning, which means you actually do want to cap the people who will attempt fully utilize the service.

Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by fennecbutt on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:34PM (#49601438)
Disagree, not for serious work if you're a developer aka requiring loads of iterations tool calls etc. But for other tasks it's relatively fine.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by globular-toast on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:36PM (#49602081)
They must have realised by now what they are selling is addictive. It's pretty normal for drug dealers and the like to give people introductory prices then hike once dependence kicks in.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by Eisenstein on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @01:27AM (#49605849)
> They must have realised by now what they are selling is addictive. It's pretty normal for drug dealers and the like to give people introductory prices then hike once dependence kicks in.

I have never heard of a drug dealer actually doing that.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by surgical_fire on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:44PM (#49602169)
The same can be said of the $200 plan.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by kraftman on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:57PM (#49601047)
Is it not due to the all the user data they are gathering?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by add-sub-mul-div on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:20PM (#49601294)
I can't believe people are letting themselves be taken for a ride so shortly after seeing what happened with streaming subscriptions.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by j3th9n on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:16PM (#49601903)
one word, localmodels
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by cyanydeez on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:03PM (#49602965)
Treat it like an economic drug.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by watty on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:18PM (#49600619)
Session limits are obnoxious and make Codex much less useful for me. I tend to code in spurts when I find some time and the $20 weekly limit was reasonable for my side projects.

I'm now hitting the session limits which means I can either purchase another plan, upgrade, or move off of Codex.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jstummbillig on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:32PM (#49600764)
The equivalent alternative is not "no hourly limits", it's simply less overall weekly allowance for Plus users, or higher prices overall. It's a way to balance a scarce resource, and maybe the least frustrating one?

People have a fair chance to learn resource management in 5 hour chunks, while not being limited to silly models, and burning through all tokens in the first hour of the week. Seems mostly good.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ignoramous on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:40PM (#49600864)
> Seems mostly good

What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jstummbillig on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:36PM (#49602092)
The rules are not changing by chance. People want to use the new model. Rules are adjusted to better meet demand.

People want things to be better more than they want things to not change. That's a good thing!

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by arw0n on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @01:35AM (#49605893)
I combine it with OpenCode + a small OpenRouter budget. GlM 5.3 Flash, Luna, Gemini 3.7 Flash and a couple of other very cheap models are sufficient for a lot of tasks if put on the right road. Telling Astra to debug an issue should be a last resort, it would blow through 10% of the session limit, but cost like 10c on one of the open models. Same goes for exploration, documentation, configuration and smaller features. These models are generally good enough, and you can still do a review with a strong model for a fraction of the cost.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by CSMastermind on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:49PM (#49600958)
Once they capature enough marketshare prices and restrictions are both going to skyrocket. The difference between the subscription usage and API pricing are stark.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jamesriso on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:56PM (#49601038)
This is interesting to think about. There's so much competition among the frontier labs and from outside via open source it just doesn't seem obvious to me they could maintain elevated prices
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by drob518 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:04PM (#49601127)
You’re going to get multiple tiers (as we already are). You’re always going to pay top dollar for frontier models, but you’re going to find things highly discounted if you’re willing to move off the frontier. See GLM 5.3 Flash, for instance.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by fwlr on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:47PM (#49602215)
There is so much competition among frontier labs, but it is a competition to see who can burn the biggest pile of cash. Once your competitors flame out, they are gone, and you are free to raise prices. Think WalMart/Uber tactics.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by piloto_ciego on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:20PM (#49601290)
It's just doomer nonsense to me.

On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.

Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.

Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.

Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.

Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.

Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.

I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.

"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by satvikpendem on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:25PM (#49601342)
Pascal's AI, I see. But yes, social media algorithms and the Internet in general have made people realize doomerism is what gets the clicks and views.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by piloto_ciego on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:34PM (#49601431)
I mean, kind of yeah? But like, there are already people working on the chips, there are already people designing the next hardware, etc. I'm sure we're going to get to a plateau in capability soon-ish? Exponentials are actually all sigmoids. But what does that look like? If the plateau in capability is 100s of times smarter than the average person (arguably we're already there in many many but not all domains) then in 10 years time last year's reasoning model etched into an ASIC or some crazy monstrosity built out of FPGAs but for LLMs is probably way more than enough for 99.999% of use cases?

But yeah, doomerism is the dominant narrative of the day here right now. There's a sort of eschatological poisoning that's happening presently. Nobody can even seem to imagine a world where things get better. It's crazy. Maybe it's because I recently went through a major illness, maybe it's because I hit my head one-to-many times along the way? But I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am now.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nozzlegear on Monday September 07, 2026 @10:51PM (#49605209)
Am I allowed to be a "doomer" if I don't have social media?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by missingcolours on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:31PM (#49601412)
Doesn't seem to have incentivized cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from being in that last category for years...
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by piloto_ciego on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:47PM (#49601594)
Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by f30e3dfed1c9 on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @01:06AM (#49605766)
> Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

Don't forget the criminals. When it comes to crypto, never forget the criminals.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by piloto_ciego on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:42PM (#49618737)
I mean, that's totally fair.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by pinkmuffinere on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:04PM (#49601123)
Ya, setting aside any judgement about what's "right", this strategy doesn't seem profitable. There's no real moat between one model/provider to another, switching is relatively easy. I don't understand how this is supposed to work for them.

It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by sidrag22 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:10PM (#49601184)
just dont fall in love with goofy memory style features and its likely gonna be fairly easy to just plug and play whatever model for a ton of use cases.

I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dwaite on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:29PM (#49602024)
Every project I have tends toward coding agents over time partly for this reason - if nothing else, I want have both control, visibility and portability over memory and a log of the reasoning that went into the current state of things.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by Den_VR on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:09PM (#49601175)
It should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by KronisLV on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:55PM (#49601024)
This would need to be a collusion across most of the providers (which I think is likely to happen) otherwise OpenAI would get ditched for Anthropic or vice versa, depending on who raises the prices more. If it happens across the board then enterprises that can use Chinese models won’t have that many options but to pay up.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by andybak on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:30PM (#49601407)
Where's the moat? You can only truly "capture market share" if there's lock-in and no competition.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by CSMastermind on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @12:13AM (#49605547)
Harness and data seem like two vectors. It's also not clear to me that at some point we won't get a snowball effect from the platform that has the most use and thus the most training data just running away with a positive feedback loop.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by johnnyApplePRNG on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:56PM (#49601032)
That's the fever-dream that OpenAI et al is fraudulently marketing to their investors I suspect, yes.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by minimaxir on Monday September 07, 2026 @12:52PM (#49600368)
In hindsight, this makes more sense with the release of Astra. The $100/mo is now a more compelling upsell.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by programmarchy on Monday September 07, 2026 @12:57PM (#49600413)
Yep, worked on me...
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by msh on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:30PM (#49600745)
I went another way and signed up for a opencode go subscription on the side.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ronsor on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:37PM (#49600818)
Opencode Go's value is pretty poor these days. It was better a month or two ago.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by quietsegfault on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:41PM (#49600871)
Can you talk more about what changed in the last two months? I use open router for when I run out of limits, and I’ve done better than buying an additional sub for my uses. I thought about looking at a more niche player, but it’s not a priority for me yet.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ronsor on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:48PM (#49600944)
First of all, it still has the 5 hour limits, which is what this thread is about and what I think what most in this thread want to avoid.

Second, the offerings are subject to change at random. They advertised $60 of usage for $10/month (knowing most users wouldn't reach that). This was consistently the case up until early August, when the per-model "usage multipliers" started taking over. Some models give $15 of usage per month, others $30, still others remain at $60, and apparently one at $100 now?[0] Either way, I don't want to expend the mental effort to track which model is the best deal for capability and usage.

Right now I use Hyper[1] for $20/month and give $100/month to OpenAI. Not OpenAI's biggest fan, but the value is good right now, and that's what matters.

[0] https://opencode.ai/docs/go/

[1] https://hyper.charm.land

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by drob518 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:36PM (#49601454)
What does Hyper give you that OpenCode doesn’t? Is it just the removal of the 5 hour limit? I looked at Hyper’s docs but it wasn’t clear exactly how the fine points work. Is it $20 for as much as you want of any model they support? They don’t say that but they don’t say no limits anywhere that I could find. Been using OpenRouter with API prices and choosing cheap models to get work done. It works but a $20 all you can eat provider with access to good models like Kimi 3 and GLM 5.3 who is not in china and doesn’t retain or train on data would be perfect for me.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ronsor on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:39PM (#49601489)
Hyper gives $12.50 worth of usage every 24 hours, totaling $375 per month. It resets at the same time regardless of when you start, unlike the 5 hour limits on other providers. Yes, it's only $20/month. It's also insanely fast; I've never gotten 75+ tokens/sec on K3 from any other provider.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by drob518 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:46PM (#49601570)
Okay, thanks. Yea, that’s a good deal as long as you’re satisfied with the models they offer. I didn’t see a listing of all the models but there was one screenshot that implied various open models (showed downrev versions of GLM, Kimi, etc., so I figured they supported the latest.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ronsor on Monday September 07, 2026 @04:00PM (#49602346)
You can check https://hyper.charm.land/v1/models for the complete list.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by drob518 on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @09:31AM (#49610106)
Perfect, thanks.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by esafak on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:40PM (#49600861)
What changed, increased quantization and reduced context windows?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by redox99 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:10PM (#49601186)
5h limits are awful. It means it is literally unable to complete a large task.

A better approach if they want to balance the load is having higher usage or lower usage consumption at different times of day.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nicce on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:16PM (#49601255)
5h limit is gone with one prompt with Sol or Astra with high or higher thinking.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by pkulak on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:13PM (#49601216)
So use the api? You’re not getting a giant discount for nothing. The 5-hour limit is great for all my personal stuff.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by redox99 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:21PM (#49601309)
I use the $100 which currently doesn't have the 5h limit.

The 5h limit hurts the most on the $20 plan because the limit is already very small (5h is ~15% of your weekly).

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by chid on Monday September 07, 2026 @04:10PM (#49602469)
Haven’t these been back for weeks now?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by robotswantdata on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:27PM (#49600721)
This is very fair. Compared to Claude the Codex limits are much better and smarter model.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ttul on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:17PM (#49601266)
My goodness, the complaining... Just get all your devs a $200 ChatGPT Pro (20x) plan. Yes, you lose the "team" component, but you gain so much more. And what's $200 against the salary of a good developer? It's absolutely inconsequential, even in far cheaper non-US salary regimes.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by Synthetic7346 on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:14PM (#49601890)
Devs are already on an enterprise plan. I think the people complaining are the personal use folks
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by alpineman on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:01PM (#49601756)
Sam, is that you?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ttul on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:47PM (#49603315)
I think Sam would be saying something pithier. And the 20x Pro plan absolutely runs at a loss, so I think he would be the last one to promote it.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by alpineman on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @04:27AM (#49607306)
Think they are pretty happy with 20x pro subscribers, even at a loss. Highest value customer base, they'll be happy to take a loss to gain market share.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by beginnings on Monday September 07, 2026 @10:09PM (#49604932)
i would love to give them $200 a month, but unfortunately I have no money

AI is just another case of the rich getting richer, people who dont really need AI with practically unlimited access, and people who need to it to try and change their lives being priced out

its a wealth inequality accelerator at the worst time in history for wealth inequality

i would take 50% less usage just to be able to use it in my own time, the plus plan without 5 hour limit gives me 1 days work a week, so 4 days of usage per month, and I was happy with that

now thats been taken away i get 15 minutes of usage then 5 hours later ive lost interest in the work, i now sit with 70% usage knowing 5 hours ago that a reset was coming and I couldnt even be bothered using it

its completely killed the product for me, im now paying 20 a month for something that is no use to me

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by estebarb on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:34PM (#49600783)
I dislike this approach. In my opinion it is much useful a 1x/2x billing based on hour like Deepseek does. Being unable to use it at the hours I need it makes me want to remove the service, not upgrading it.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by Gurio on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:35PM (#49600802)
This is one of the reasons I’ve built a resident daemon on top a local CC/codex. 5h sessions is a [lazy] way to shift the scaling responsibility onto a user, so they are staying with us for a while
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by almog on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:31PM (#49600758)
Previous discussion (from 13 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by reenorap on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:43PM (#49600894)
How is 5 hrs being measured and over what time period?
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by dwaite on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:37PM (#49602103)
it is a window that starts with usage and continues for five hours.

When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.

The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.

That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nozzlegear on Monday September 07, 2026 @10:57PM (#49605239)
> When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.

> The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by gowthamgts12 on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:47PM (#49600937)
when you send your first message, the timer will start.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by colechristensen on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:47PM (#49600928)
In all of them I've seen it's a window that starts when you haven't been using it in a while and begin work OR when your previous window expired. The window starts with a set number of tokens and cuts you off when they're used, it is fully reset at the end of the window (it's not a sliding window).

When you haven't used any tokens for an extended amount of time it reverts to the point where whenever you send your first token is when the window begins.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by ipdashc on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:37PM (#49601469)
Hm, it seems like it'd make sense to automate a script to send one small prompt at, say, 7 or 8am so that you get your reset around noon instead of having to wait until 5h or more into the workday.

I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by d1sxeyes on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:51PM (#49601644)
Some third party harnesses allow you to do this, definitely makes sense.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by indigodaddy on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:01PM (#49601092)
What also sucks is your weekly reset does not also reset your 5 hourly. A bit like a slap in the face..
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by andybak on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:40PM (#49601497)
Oh that's just sloppy of them.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jeanmichelselli on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:30PM (#49600739)
Clearly, the prices and limitations will increase with time if they don't find an efficient way to perform training and inference of LLMs. It would be great to see those issues being seriously addressed and, eventually, being fixed for good. THAT would definitely make an important and practical difference. Not only economically but also scientifically.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by parineum on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:40PM (#49600854)
I always wonder where the people are who continually claim that this whole thing is already profitable are when prices are increased or services cut.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by alastair1646 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:41PM (#49601518)
I think the people that are saying that mean that the inference is massively profitable. From what I've seen, the margins are between 50 and 90% on an API call. It's the training that's very, very expensive!

As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by parineum on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @11:23AM (#49611699)
Inference requires training. That's a disingenuous point.

It's similar to people talking about drug companies charging hundreds of dollars for a medication that costs dollars to manufacture. Nevermind that it took them 15 years of research and trials to discover it and get it through trials and the approval process. Nevermind again all the drugs that failed at one of those steps.

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by drob518 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:17PM (#49601264)
I’ve not heard anyone say that the whole thing is profitable. Companies like Anthropic have said that inference is profitable, but I assume that’s only on a steady state basis, which nobody in the industry has ever reached at this point. As far as I know, everyone is still burning cash with data center buildouts and overall training costs.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jonpurdy on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:00PM (#49601085)
Controversial take but this works better for me than just the weekly limit. I have about 1-2 hours of sustained focus per 5 hour period so if I run out of tokens then I can take a break and start again in a few hours. Or just use the top ups that I’ve paid for in case I want to push through.

Having just the weekly limit meant I could blow through too much within the first couple of days. Fortunately, resets were raining down during that time.

(I know I could just vibe code a tracker that splits up my usage into arbitrary periods and lets me know when to take a break. Maybe if they remove the 5-hour limit again.)

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by pxx on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:13PM (#49601219)
Wait, what? Hasn't this been the case for more than a week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by nullbio on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:10PM (#49601185)
I think it's reasonable for the Plus plans to have this. If you're doing any serious work you should be on the Pro plan. If you're a casual user, 5 hours is more than plenty.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by xqcgrek2 on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:12PM (#49601205)
OpenAI must be under a lot of pressure to make the books balanced. A bleak sign for Anthropic's IPO and the stock market.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by jauntywundrkind on Monday September 07, 2026 @04:08PM (#49602459)
At least we all got a reset out of it! I was holding off, refreshing & smashing "beg" on https://codex-resets.com

I appreciate that he gave the heads-up. I deliberately burned through my quota yesterday, low key expecting a reset, but ready if I needed to use a other banked reset.

> Thanks for reading. We will do a global reset of the usage for all paid subscriptions so that you can keep enjoying Astra after burning through all of it doing fun 3D modeling in blender. The work week is about to start.

> Lands around 6pm PST today.

https://m.x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097043464538264003

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by browningstreet on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:32PM (#49600770)
Codex pharming on X should take a dip…
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by installiskeycon on Monday September 07, 2026 @12:45PM (#49600283)
KARIBIK
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by PaywallBuster on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:18PM (#49600621)
This allows users to pace their subscription usage to last the whole week.

I've had few weekends where I spend the full week credits over night then have nothing to do for a week

Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by recursive on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:55PM (#49601029)
It might be good to have at least two hobbies.
Re:Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and bus... by wrkronmiller on Monday September 07, 2026 @01:21PM (#49600654)
They could make this opt-in or opt-out