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Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
In case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week. Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less.
- installiskeycon 1mo ago[dead]
- shmoil 1mo ago[dead]
- minimaxir 1mo agoIn hindsight, this makes more sense with the release of Astra. The $100/mo is now a more compelling upsell.
- programmarchy 1mo agoYep, worked on me...
- msh 1mo agoI went another way and signed up for a opencode go subscription on the side.
- ronsor 1mo agoOpencode Go's value is pretty poor these days. It was better a month or two ago.
- esafak 1mo agoWhat changed, increased quantization and reduced context windows?
- quietsegfault 1mo agoCan 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.
- ronsor 1mo agoFirst 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/ https://opencode.ai/docs/go/ [1] https://hyper.charm.land https://hyper.charm.land
- drob518 1mo agoWhat 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.
- ronsor 1mo agoHyper 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.
- watty 1mo agoSession 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.
- jstummbillig 1mo agoThe 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.
- ignoramous 1mo ago> Seems mostly good What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.
- jstummbillig 1mo agoThe 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!
- arw0n 1mo agoI 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.
- 1mo ago
- PaywallBuster 1mo agoThis 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
- wrkronmiller 1mo agoThey could make this opt-in or opt-out
- recursive 1mo agoIt might be good to have at least two hobbies.
- jeanmichelselli 1mo agoClearly, 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.
- parineum 1mo agoI always wonder where the people are who continually claim that this whole thing is already profitable are when prices are increased or services cut.
- drob518 1mo agoI’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.
- alastair1646 1mo agoI 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.
- parineum 1mo agoInference 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.
- robotswantdata 1mo agoThis is very fair. Compared to Claude the Codex limits are much better and smarter model.
- almog 1mo agoPrevious discussion (from 13 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
- browningstreet 1mo agoCodex pharming on X should take a dip…
- estebarb 1mo agoI 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.
- Gurio 1mo agoThis 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
- paxys 1mo agoPeople 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.
- solenoid0937 1mo agoI hope everyone recognized the cheap tokens as a transparent ploy to gain more users before jacking up prices. This was obvious from day one.
- brazukadev 1mo agoAs long as there is no path to profitability going from subsidized to fully paid tokens we are making them lose money.
- tehjoker 1mo agoThis 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.
- brazukadev 1mo agoThat's their goal but if they fail we got LLMs "for free".
- password54321 1mo agoIt is really about data. The endgame is not about hoping devs give them money.
- copperx 1mo agoMore data isn't helping much, if Astra is any indication.
- reenorap 1mo agoHow is 5 hrs being measured and over what time period?
- colechristensen 1mo agoIn 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.
- ipdashc 1mo agoHm, 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
- d1sxeyes 1mo agoSome third party harnesses allow you to do this, definitely makes sense.
- gowthamgts12 1mo agowhen you send your first message, the timer will start.
- dwaite 1mo agoit 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.
- CSMastermind 1mo agoOnce they capature enough marketshare prices and restrictions are both going to skyrocket. The difference between the subscription usage and API pricing are stark.
- KronisLV 1mo agoThis 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.
- johnnyApplePRNG 1mo agoThat's the fever-dream that OpenAI et al is fraudulently marketing to their investors I suspect, yes.
- jamesriso 1mo agoThis 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
- Den_VR 1mo agoIt should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives.
- pinkmuffinere 1mo agoYa, 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
- jonpurdy 1mo agoControversial 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.)
- indigodaddy 1mo agoWhat also sucks is your weekly reset does not also reset your 5 hourly. A bit like a slap in the face..
- andybak 1mo agoOh that's just sloppy of them.
- nullbio 1mo agoI 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.
- redox99 1mo ago5h 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.
- pkulak 1mo agoSo use the api? You’re not getting a giant discount for nothing. The 5-hour limit is great for all my personal stuff.
- redox99 1mo agoI 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).
- nicce 1mo ago5h limit is gone with one prompt with Sol or Astra with high or higher thinking.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 1mo agoOpenAI must be under a lot of pressure to make the books balanced. A bleak sign for Anthropic's IPO and the stock market.
- pxx 1mo agoWait, what? Hasn't this been the case for more than a week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432879
- ttul 1mo agoMy 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- alpineman 1mo agoSam, is that you?
- ttul 1mo agoI 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.
- alpineman 1mo agoThink 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.
- Synthetic7346 1mo agoDevs are already on an enterprise plan. I think the people complaining are the personal use folks
- beginnings 1mo agoi 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
- miguelfrreg 1mo ago[flagged]
- lowken10 1mo ago[dead]
- jauntywundrkind 1mo agoAt least we all got a reset out of it! I was holding off, refreshing & smashing "beg" on https://codex-resets.com 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 https://m.x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097043464538264003
- chid 1mo agoHaven’t these been back for weeks now?
- ArthaudMe 1mo ago[flagged]
- julius-verdyct 1mo ago[flagged]