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Comment by RationPhantoms

14 hours ago

There is weaponized malaise employed by these frontier model providers and I feel like that dark-pattern, what you pointed out, and others are employed to rate-limit certain subscriptions.

9 comments

RationPhantoms

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bri3d  13 hours ago

They have two products:

* Subscription plans, which are (probably) subsidized and definitely oversubscribed (ie, 100% of subscribers could not use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time).

* Wholesale tokens, which are (probably) profitable.

If you try to use one product as the other product, it breaks their assumptions and business model.

I don't really see how this is weaponized malaise; capacity planning and some form of over-subscription is a widely accepted thing in every industry and product in the universe?

  • tomashubelbauer  13 hours ago

    I am curious to see how this will pan out long-term. Is the quality gap of Opus-4.5 over GPT-5.2 large enough to overcome the fact that OpenAI has merged these two bullet points into one? I think Anthropic might have bet on no other frontier lab daring to disconnect their subscription from their in-house coding agent and OpenAI called their bluff to get some free marketing following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.

    • bri3d  13 hours ago

      It will also be interesting to see which model is more sustainable once the money fire subsidy musical chairs start to shake out; it all depends on how many whales there are in both directions I think (subscription customers using more than expected vs large buys of profitable API tokens).

  • Propelloni  13 hours ago

    So, if I rent out my bike to you for an hour a day for really cheap money and I do so a 50 more times to 50 others, so that my bike is oversubscribed and you and others don't get your hours, that's OK because it is just capacity planning on my side and widely accepted? Good to know.

    • bri3d  12 hours ago

      Let me introduce you to Citibike?

      Also, this is more like "I sell a service called take a bike to the grocery store" with a clause in the contract saying "only ride the bike to the grocery store." I do this because I am assuming that most users will ride the bike to the grocery store 1 mile away a few times a week, so they will remain available, even though there is an off chance that some customers will ride laps to the store 24/7. However, I also sell a separate, more expensive service called Bikes By the Hour.

      My customers suddenly start using the grocery store plan to ride to a pub 15 miles away, so I kick them off of the grocery store plan and make them buy Bikes By the Hour.

    • elzbardico  12 hours ago

      As others pointed out, every business that sells capacity does this, including your ISP provider.

      They could, of course, price your 10GB plan under the assumption that you would max out your connection 24 hours a day.

      I fail to see how this would be advantageous to the vast majority of the customers.

      1 reply →

    • dehugger  12 hours ago

      Yes, correct. Essentially every single industry and tool which rents out capacity of any system or service does this. Your ISP does this. The airline does this. Cruise lines. Cloud computing environments. Restaurants. Rental cars. The list is endless.