Those resets and the removal of the 5-hour usage limit are quietly anchoring me to a much higher usage baseline. I've stopped rationing and just spawn a bunch of agents to work at whatever pace I want, because there always seem to be more resets on the way (at least true for the last week). And now I am actually worried about that if one day they just stop doing so, my "normal" workflow will suddenly exceed the limit, and upgrading will feel like a step backwards.
Can anyone explain how you “win” the market of super intelligence? Particularly with open weights models now rivaling the frontier, it seems like a race to the bottom even if the prices don’t yet reflect that.
"race to the bottom" is the negative framing of "competitive market prices".
So a company or union might say "this is a race to the bottom" when someone new enters their market, but to people buying their services this might be seen as welcome competition.
Do you actually see a negative impact from competition in this area? Or do you just mean competition will further reduce prices?
"race to the bottom" is also a response to a "market for lemons". It's not necessarily a good thing because while pricing drops to the floor so also does value to the customer in general. Usually it happens when price is very visible but the details of what the buyer actually receives are not.
Regulatory capture. You get them to outlaw the part of the competion (safety!) that is unwilling to pricefix and participate in your margin and market division agreements.
Everyone is raising the bottom. Kimi got 60% more expensive during the 2.x cycle despite staying the exact same size.
Now K3 is almost 6x the cost of the original K2 checkpoint, and while the parameter count finally jumped, it's still an extremely sparse MoE and definitely does not cost 6x what the original K2 checkpoint did to host at scale.
Race to the bottom only takes real effect when there's a cap to the capabilities, otherwise everyone races to the bottom of a rising target (how economically valuable the tokens are)
"Why" as in, why take lower margins when Moonshot currently can't service all the demand for the model anyways. Based on past models no one is going to massively undercut Moonshot: few have the chops to serve it as efficiently as Moonshot and of those few, most of them don't go for being the cheapest, they go for being fast + reliable (think Together, Fireworks).
You get what you pay for applies very much with how many axes there are to serving these increasingly large models.
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And for "with what compute": as the value of a token goes up, what people are willing to pay for compute is going up.
Every once in a while I'll see a story about falling rental rates, but with even slightly more established clouds I've been seeing availability get worse and worse over time.
I'm pretty sure the only reason the highly informal indexes don't reflect this is because every neocloud trying to cash in on an NVIDIA Inception discount kicks off by selling unrealistically cheap compute for a bit.
This is actually what I've started to feel a vague nagging concern about as well..
Say what you will, there's no way I'm going back to non-AI assisted coding. Even though I don't use AI to generate code or assets, it's great for reviews and brainstorming etc.
What if OpenAI/Anthropic decide to do a Netflix/Spotify move and pull the rug out from under us one day?
Like skyrocketing the price, or limiting peasants to older models (because Glorious Leader said so), or maybe some leak comes out that they've been spying on us all along.
This feels a lot like free spins in slot machines. I have a friend obsessed with using up all the Fable usage which supposedly ends today. He's doing a lot of stuff of questionable usefulness just because it's a resource perceived as scarce.
I'm kind of impressed how often they manage to do this. Claude Code and Grok Build do resets too, but nowhere near this often. And in an ironic twist for a big company with the infrastructure, Google Antigravity never seems to do resets like this at all (at least that I've noticed). I wonder how much this stuff costs OpenAI to do?
They can do it often because they have compute, and they have compute mostly because they are pretty far behind Anthropic when it comes to heavy enterprise users. They’ve supposedly added several million since 5.6 launch, which is a steep growth curve. We will see if those users stick around. Anecdotally, I’ve stopped using it for anything major because it has attempted to do some very unsafe things when I wasn’t looking. Friends I’ve talked to have also gotten over the initial honeymoon period.
They (OpenAI) also made many more deals to acquire compute before they actually had the revenue to support it. They paraded around the world making deals with everyone and anyone. By doing it earlier, they got way better unit prices. Anthropic bought their compute at significantly higher prices by waiting until they actually had demand to fulfill.
I’m not sure if resets require that much compute, maybe a few whales will use the service a bit more right after a reset. What matters more is the money, as they’re giving away free usage, and subsidising subscription users even more.
Crazy value for money now with the banked resets. At my $COMPANY, we have claude enterprise at API pricing. I've blown through $10k already this month, opting for Opus 4.8 w/ Sonnet 5 agents where possible. On my codex pro plan, I am 5.6 sol'ing my way everyday with the odd ultra mode. Point being my real API usage here must be very unsustainable!
API pricing itself might have extreme margins compared to the real cost. Anyway, in my testing the Pro 20x $200 plan gives you about $2200 API-equivalent weekly usage if you're only using GPT 5.6 Sol, so quite close to $9k-$10k/month API-equivalent, it's a bit inconsistent with cache costs.
It's very interesting that for Anthropic the $100 and $200 plans only differ 2x in weekly limits, the 5 hour limit differences are more severe. But for OpenAI, Pro 20x is, well, 4x of Pro 5x for only 2x cost. So, for example, 100% of weekly usage for Codex on a Plus ($20) account is just 5% of weekly usage for Codex on Pro 20x.
And you can calculate how much extra usage you can get from resets, and especially banked resets by purposefully using the whole quota and using your banked reset - they expire 30 days after they're given out, so if you don't use one, it just disappears.
The $200 plan is explicitly 4x the $100 plan[1] only for "per session". That's so vague. I initially pushed back against your claim, but reading now Anthropic is not at all clear, in fact.
Empirically it is quite easy to validate that the "20x" plan is misleading and only give you twice the weekly limits of the "5x" plan, and many people on r/ClaudeAI, etc can verify that.
Anthropic is also the one often playing games with:
* The "+30% tokens" tokeniser, alongside also gating token counting behind an API (versus the MIT tiktoken for OpenAI), so who knows if it's really a new tokeniser or of it's just a disguised price increase.
* Prompt injections appended to API (not just Claude.ai or Claude Code!), such as <ethics_reminders>, or LCRs (long conversation reminders), which you never asked but still pay for with expensive API. You can detect this because your input_tokens, as reported by the Messages response, sometimes don't match, and are higher than your actual input.
(Alternatively, for testing purposes, create a tool like `telemetry_log_anthropic_reminder` or something and instruct your system prompt to require Claude to call the tool anytime it detects any Anthropic/Claude reminder masquerading in the user input -- mostly reliable; but misses some reminders).
In particular, the long conversational reminders, when incorrectly triggered by a classifier and (almost silently, unless you track tokens) appended to an API / agentic coding session, can ruin your agent's performance; and it often fires repeatedly once the classifier kicks in.
If you're using Anthropic API, you need to set up metrics/logging for how often they are appending things to your prompt without your knowledge.
So far I have not empirically observed prompt injection by the OpenAI API, only Anthropic APIs.
How do you spend so much? Our company also has Claude enterprise pricing. I have a monthly limit of $800, I use Opus for everything, and I'm around the limit after the month. Genuinely can't imagine spending 12 times as many tokens without intentionally trying to waste money.
I am not trying to tokenmaxx, but I will work on 2-3 tickets simultaneously in seperate terminals (worktrees). Also having Claude triage and check logs etc. - plus the odd bit of project planning in Claude desktop/cowork. We also have a triage agent skill for the work I’m doing which fans out. All in all deadlines looming so it’s been a case of pump out the work and prove the product. I suppose if you’re in more a BAU state this kind of usage is overkill.
> Point being my real API usage here must be very unsustainable!
I think it’s funny that everyone anchors to the API pricing as the real cost.
Most likely is that their API costs are printing profits. They can sell the subscription plans at a slight loss because it gets more people like you hooked on GPT models at home and suggesting them at work, where the real money is made.
I think their subscription plans go mostly unused when averaged across all subscribers, too. Some customers are getting great deals by maxing out 100% every week, but most probably use much less.
The reset game is an addictive challenge that gets the hardcore users more hooked on their products because you feel pressured to use it as much as you can before the next unpredictable surprise reset lands.
Idk, Kimi K3 is not that much cheaper than Opus and it’s probably a smaller model. We’ll know for certain when commodity providers price it, but I expect it to be the same price.
It really depends on caching[1] and active parameters, and some dark arts really only possible at Hyperscalers they also have better access to 288GB VRAM B300s[2] that really makes a difference in cache space.
K3 may be bit smaller/ similar in total parameter count than Opus, but Opus (and GPT) definitely has become a lot more efficient in the last 6 months or so, hence more or less forced upgrades. I expect the active parameter count and cache performance is quite different.
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Opus is still almost twice as expensive (if tokens were equal) at $5/$15 compared to K3 at $3/$15. Tokens are not equal though, Anthropic's tokenizer is much less dense than other frontier lab's so the actual price difference is like 3x.
Kimi uses more reasoning tokens and is generally more inefficient with its usage, that doesn't impact token cost economics for the provider though . It does for us as buyers thus the need to evaluating by Cost per task rather than unit pricing.
On pure tokens/$ - there is definitely room for a price war if operators start going by pure unit costs. Both probably want(ed) to have good enough numbers in preparing for the IPO.
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[1] the pricing kind of reflect this already - 10x diff for uncached input.
[2] Moonshot does not have access latest gen GPUs so their unit economics is likely hampered a bit for high parameter models.
Kicking myself that I didn't use one of my 4 resets which just expired, but then again, they reset our usage anyway. We are just blasting away with 5.6-Sol-ultra, doing a project I wouldn't have otherwise done (basically drastically editing someone's novel for them and adding illustrations).
Yes I honestly think if we pull it off the revenue would easily pay off. Otherwise an expensive experiment, but with fewer staff so the damage is less than it used to be and a verdict much faster.
> At my $COMPANY, we have claude enterprise at API pricing. I've blown through $10k already this month, opting for Opus 4.8 w/ Sonnet 5 agents where possible.
A very happy gambler of tokens at the Anthropic casino, running up costs on the house at no cost to them, but to $COMPANY paying.
That’s less than the fully loaded cost of hiring another engineer.
If someone is making the case that it’s helping the team get twice as much work done without hiring more people (which I’m neither agreeing with or disagreeing with) then the bean counters would actually prefer it. Hiring people is messy and expensive. Spending on API costs is a dial that you can turn down later if you need to, without laying anyone off and paying severance.
They, like every startup ever, count users in a very stupid way.
One person using the app on two computers and a phone? That's obviously 3 users.
Growth Hackers and SEO types have done so much to make the world an insufferable place. I congradulate them on the OpenClaw psyop, that was some very inspired bullshit that did fuck all and is now irrelevant.
Such a counting method doesn’t explain that incredible growth. Do you think day by day huge portions of users are using additional devices in perpetuity?
I would expect them to grow faster than 1 million users a day in that case, since chatGPT has almost a billion users. Maybe everyone's just using the web app or mobile?
My /usage is telling me '+50% weekly limits promo through Aug 19' - that's huge, and better than what I'm getting with the equivalent Codex plan I have right now. Though what Codex does have over Claude is Sol /fast - that hands down is the best coding experience right now.
FWIW, this was announced before the day where the +50% limit promotion from May was supposed to end, so effectively continuing the promotion. This will mean that you retain the same usage instead of seeing it drop.
I guess if they'd reduce the usage in their current stage they'll only lose customers - this is not a perk, it's damage control.
Anthropic has been like this for a while, although in their latest announcement, the $20 tier won't have the "cheap" access to Fable, and neither will the $100 tier.
I really wish there was a canonical platform endpoint to programmatically check Codex usage amount and the quota reset times so I could just vibecode an app to alert "hey, your usage just went to 100% so that means OpenAI did a reset" and "hey, your 5-hour usage is at 10%, wrap up what you're doing".
The only way to do it now is through shenanigans with the Codex App Server which is not ideal.
Just ask Codex to use its local auth token as a bearer token and send a GET request to it. The response includes "available_count" and "credits[].expires_at". Or script it yourself obviously.
The 5h limit is gone (for now). It does not presently need to be chased. :)
For the automated checking of other stuff: It was a one-shot prompt to get Codex clank up some Python that returns remaining usage, next reset time/date, and so on.
The result does use Codex App Server, but it's a short-lived process that is dealt with over stdio so that's... fine-ish, I guess?
The API endpoints on this page accept an OAuth token from ~/.codex/auth.json. You can simply ask Codex to create a report skill with some curl examples.
There were a few tweets about it so they weren't super quiet about it. I think you can get it back by setting `model_context_window=YOUR_VALUE` in ~/.codex/config.toml though.
I've had this too on my personal pro plan and also when I run the usage command it says it's resetting tomorrow rather than getting cut off.
I'm trying to squeeze what I can in the meantime but I feel like they said it was getting cut off multiple times and they keep extending and possibly resetting it (havent been looking close enough to know for sure)
I'm starting to think It might be a good idea to stay with American models, by virtue of them feeling so threatened they give out more and more free perks.
> I'm starting to think It might be a good idea to stay with American models, by virtue of them feeling so threatened they give out more and more free perks.
If you keep staying with them, they'd feel less and less threatened.
You need to use them about half as much as you do a Chinese model so that the usage stats that get collected show them that they are still losing users (and attention) to the Chinese models.
Originally yes, everyone's usage limit went back to 100% at the same time regardless of if you were at 0% or 99%. Now they tend to give out "banked" resets where users can choose when to use it for up to a month (except the most recent one, which I think was non-banked)
Are they more expensive? I think it's a clever tactic that avoids sudden increased workload, because users may "save" their resets when they need some additional work done.
I stopped paying for Codex because of this shit. "Whoops we burned a week of 20x usage in minutes because we fucked up the cache again. You can keep paying money to get more resets to fix it"
nah, I'll use open models. Only way I'd use codex now is if it was free, and I don't mean someone else paying for it. I would rather have them pay for DSv4P or Kimi
I didn't knew about these resets up until a few days back... and every time they used to reset these limits, I thought I was going crazy... the usage numbers just didn't match. And the weekly end window just kept pushing ahead by a day or a few... just the right amount of deviation to make you believe you are going crazy.
hese resets are a trap. They're artificially anchoring our workflows to a massive baseline, trapping us for the inevitable 5x price hike when the market finally consolidates.
Are Codex users even a drop in the bucket of overall use? I mean, it's a pretty specific way to interact with the bot.
Codex usage is clearly common enough to have entered the vernacular of folks here on HN.
But we aren't everyone, and it seems likely to me that there's a lot more people in the world burning tokens using ChatGPT than there are who even know what Codex is.
If I would have my tin foil hat on I'd say they can manipulate how the subscription usage gets calculate during the week, so that these resets don't cost them much or anything. Sometimes it feels like the usage just disappears with nothing to show for it.
> OpenAI obviously is doing it to gain mindshare but they're burning money before their IPO and can't sustain these resets.
We don’t know that. If they have already paid for the hardware and it is not running 100%, and customers would not pay to get reset, they don’t really lose money.
I think it's mostly to spread hype for the new models. Sol can be ridiculously long running, even without /goal so it can run for 12hr+ on a problem with defined and verifiable output. So it's a good way for people to get hyped about the capabilities without worrying about usage limits.
It's a pretty smart move. If they weren't doing this, I would have simply switched back to DeepSeek, Mimo, GLM, etc. (and maybe K3) whenever I hit my usage limits, as was my normal custom.
I personally believe that they are buying time until they can make current gov. to bring-in a legislation that targets Chinese models one way or the other.
And now Kimi-K3 has caused a new Deepseek moment.. but this time, the only horizon that was still untouched: frontier performance.
Yup! Big beautiful burning pile of cash. Though there’s some nuance with subsidizing inference (which is supposed to make them money long term) vs training (which we’re supposed to ignore I guess).
And they can’t stop because they want to IPO soon, and stopping this madness would signal loudly that they are bleeding cash, don’t really have a business model, and might not be worth $2 trillion after all.
there's now a live status page tracking when a trillion-dollar company decides to hand out free compute, and refreshing it at 2am feels like a completely reasonable thing to do
there is now a dedicated dashboard tracking when a tech company resets its own rate limits and it is somehow more reliable than the actual product status page
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