Comment by input_sh
4 hours ago
Here comes the "you're using it wrong" defence!
Let's be perfectly clear: if user actions had anything to do with hitting these limits, the limits would be prominently displayed within the tool itself, you'd be able to watch it change in real time, and you'd be able to pinpoint your usage per each conversation and per each message within that conversation.
The fact that you cannot do that is not because they can't be bothered to add such a feature, but because they want to be able to tweak those numbers on the backend while still having plausible deniability and being able to blame it on the user.
Instead, the little "usage stats" they give you is grouped by the hour and only split between input and output tokens, telling you nothing.
Interesting. What do you think the reason for not being transparent on this matter?
For the same reason they use "tokens" instead of kilobytes: so that you don't do the conversion yourself and realise that for example spending a million "tokens" on claude-opus-4.6 costs you anywhere from $10 (input tokens) to $37.5 (output tokens). Now, 1 million tokens sounds pretty big and "unreachable" until you realise that's about 4 megabytes of text. It's less than three floppy disks of data going back and forth.
Now let's assume you want to send a CD worth of data to Opus 4.6. 700 megabytes * $10 (price per million input tokens) / 4 (rounding down one megabyte to roughly 250k "tokens") = $1750. For Opus 4.6 to return a CD amount of data back to you: $37.50 * 700 / 4 = ~$6.5k.
A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio would cost you $5.7 million. A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio on gpt-5.2-pro would cost you $25.2 million. (Note: OpenAI's API pricing still hasn't been updated to reflect 5.3 prices.)
So we get layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of obfuscation to hide those numbers from you when you simply subscribe for a fixed monthly fee!
Do people care about how many bytes they are sending or receiving?
Most people care about getting the right bytes.
Blurring the cost-benefit analysis in the interest of downplaying the costs.