With the way things are, they actively drive you to get another $20 subscription at a competing service, since that's the only official way you can spend $40 on AI without going the full $100.

You can have two $20 accounts at openai that share a workspace, I believe. I think it's the pattern they recommend?

My usage pattern is "one or two evenings a week I'll sit down late at night and do something heavy". I have a life, y'know?

Their 5 hour limit works better with a "constant background trickle" usage pattern. I don't think the $20 account is a good fit for hobbyists-who-have-day-jobs (which is where I think it should be targeted). They should have an offering that meets "binge" needs.

I would love the option to choose whether you want to use 5 hour limits or some type of burst limit where you could use all of your weekly quota. Trying to spread my work out over a day with gaps is painful and while I understand that this is some intentional friction to get people to upgrade to the $100 plan that's just never going to be justified when I'm only using this plan for hobby projects, I'm not going to pay $100 per month just because I might have the time to work on something big that month. Congestion wise, I wonder if there's any real difference to 5 hour windows vs using all your weekly quota in one chunk at some random point in the week? They allowed it for a while as what I assume was an experiment to measure that and then switched back so I guess there are some consequences to it.

Once this change comes into effect and I'm not able to use the chat side of things for more casual inquiries and ideation it'll be the motivation I need to try out Claude or Grok again. I'd rather have a second subscription with a different provider than double up on one for more of the same.

I'd say it's both intentional friction, as well as just some degree of load distribution throughout the day, instead of peak hours (US work hours).

At OpenAI/Anthropic scale, they're can't just scaling up-and-down on demand on rented autoscale GPUs (to be honest; that's not really practical anymore for even medium size volume); the peak hours are basically the same for everyone.