My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”.
I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications.
If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use.
Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in.
Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision.
But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget.
I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway.
My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.
One of their three identical accounts had ~20% lower limits and the explanation was an "extremely tiny" A/B test. Makes the "5x" kind of a joke. I'd honestly take a slightly worse plan if it just published the actual token limits.
> subscription gross margins are way lower than API and meaningfully reduce revenue per MW for both OpenAI and Anthropic
I don't know about everyone else, but there is no way in hell I would pay even $200 for API-priced tokens for personal use. So at least for my sample size of one, Anthropic's revenue would not be higher if they dropped their subscription plan (they would get $0 from me instead of $200 per month).
I’m not everyone else but I am SOMEBODY else and you’re absolutely right. I was paying for Claude since they first offered subscriptions, right up until this summer.
I respect Anthropic (and OpenAI to a lesser extent) but I’m not going to play these games.
This says “Anthropic gives you 5× more API-priced model usage”, which is not equivalent to “Anthropic is 5x as much value”. This does not take into account model/harness efficiency. I tried looking up some benchmarks and Claude seemingly uses roughly 5x as many tokens while taking its sweet time to complete a task. No such thing as a coincidence.
My theory is that for a large amount of people, “work are paying anyway so what do I care?”.
I lost my job recently, so gave myself an AI budget of $100 to help with search and applications.
If I put that in OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d hit limits quickly and lose whatever I didn’t use.
Or… I could put the same money in OpenRouter, use open models at 1/25th the price, and only need to pay more when I’ve spent what I put in.
Back in January when Claude Cowork was new and Claude Code was one of the only performant harnesses, it would have been a tougher decision.
But Hermes, dsh, agy, codex, opencode, pi… they make it so easy to achieve so much with such a low budget.
I know it’s a cliche nowadays to say “just use cheaper models” but the value they offer is SO much greater. And i can switch to GPT6, or Opus 5.5 in two clicks for tasks anyway.
My point is this: OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling stunts like this because they don’t care about you and your subscription. So stop caring about them.
One of their three identical accounts had ~20% lower limits and the explanation was an "extremely tiny" A/B test. Makes the "5x" kind of a joke. I'd honestly take a slightly worse plan if it just published the actual token limits.
> subscription gross margins are way lower than API and meaningfully reduce revenue per MW for both OpenAI and Anthropic
I don't know about everyone else, but there is no way in hell I would pay even $200 for API-priced tokens for personal use. So at least for my sample size of one, Anthropic's revenue would not be higher if they dropped their subscription plan (they would get $0 from me instead of $200 per month).
I’m not everyone else but I am SOMEBODY else and you’re absolutely right. I was paying for Claude since they first offered subscriptions, right up until this summer.
I respect Anthropic (and OpenAI to a lesser extent) but I’m not going to play these games.
but ai credit runs out really really fast
This says “Anthropic gives you 5× more API-priced model usage”, which is not equivalent to “Anthropic is 5x as much value”. This does not take into account model/harness efficiency. I tried looking up some benchmarks and Claude seemingly uses roughly 5x as many tokens while taking its sweet time to complete a task. No such thing as a coincidence.
Submarine ?
Let's hope they don't nerf Opus 5.5