Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users. Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitloginTell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users97 points by spwa4 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 77 commentsIn case you're wondering why the limits behave so very different from last week.
What happened
I'm now hitting the session limits which means I can either purchase another plan, upgrade, or move off of Codex. replyjstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] The equivalent alternative is not "no hourly limits", it's simply less overall weekly allowance for Plus users, or higher prices overall. If it happens across the board then enterprises that can use Chinese models won’t have that many options but to pay up. replyjohnnyApplePRNG 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] That's the fever-dream that OpenAI et al is fraudulently marketing to their investors I suspect, yes. replywatty 1 hour ago | prev | next [–] Session limits are obnoxious and make Codex much less useful for me.
This was obvious from day one. replyskybrian 21 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Your cheap cynicism makes OpenAI's lower prices sound like a reason to avoid using them, but that's backwards! 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. replyghostly_s 13 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] Open models still need compute. replyzulux 27 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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.
I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about. replyDen_VR 29 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] It should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives. replyKronisLV 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] 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.
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. I thought about looking at a more niche player, but it’s not a priority for me yet. replyronsor 50 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] 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.
The wider picture
The 5-hour limit is great for all my personal stuff. replyredox99 17 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] 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). replynicce 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] 5h limit is gone with one prompt with Sol or Astra with high or higher thinking. replynullbio 28 minutes ago | prev | next [–] I think it's reasonable for the Plus plans to have this.
Also: this makes limit resets kind woth significantly less. paxys 59 minutes ago | next [–] 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. 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. 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. replysolenoid0937 50 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] I hope everyone recognized the cheap tokens as a transparent ploy to gain more users before jacking up prices. We don't actually know OpenAI's profit margins on inference.
What has been reported
This means you should have a way to switch models. replyfny 41 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I hope everyone recognizes they aim to make you dependent on their intelligence rather than your own. replygruez 18 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] But there's open models that are (pessimistically) 1 year behind? 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.
The proportion that runs on the SOTA models keeps dropping. replycatchnear4321 37 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I reject your intelligence and substitute my own? replyflir 41 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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. replymadaxe_again 20 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] 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. replypassword54321 46 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] It is really about data. Open models exist and run on a Mac you can buy now or in October. replyhowdareme9 34 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] please point me to an open model, that matches astra even on low reasoning, and runs on a macreplyapparent 38 minutes ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] The audience for this sort of thing is currently quite limited.
If they are "good enough" then market forces will stop Anthropic/OpenAI from charging monopoly rents. replyfennecbutt 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–] Disagree, not for serious work if you're a developer aka requiring loads of iterations tool calls etc. " 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.
What happens next
I tend to code in spurts when I find some time and the $20 weekly limit was reasonable for my side projects. It's absolutely inconsequential, even in far cheaper non-US salary regimes. replyminimaxir 1 hour ago | prev | next [–] In hindsight, this makes more sense with the release of Astra. The $100/mo is now a more compelling upsell. replyprogrammarchy 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] Yep, worked on me. . . replymsh 1 hour ago | parent | prev | next [–] I went another way and signed up for a opencode go subscription on the side. replyronsor 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] Opencode Go's value is pretty poor these days.
I use open router for when I run out of limits, and I’ve done better than buying an additional sub for my uses. They advertised $60 of usage for $10/month (knowing most users wouldn't reach that). 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. landreplydrob518 3 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] What does Hyper give you that OpenCode doesn’t?