Comment by jrmg
4 days ago
I don't understand the pricing on that page.
The headline figures are $10/month for 'Go' with "Generous limits" and $40/month for 'Go Plus' with "Higher limits".
Then, in the table below, picking (at random of course) Claude Haiku 5.5, I see it listing 3,850 'requests' per 5h for 'Go', 15,380 'requests' per hour for 'Go Plus'. Then there's another column saying that the "Monthly Usage" is $15 for 'Go', and $60 for 'Go Plus'.
What are the limits?
What's a 'request' and how does it relate to a token?
Why are the 'requests' figures per '5h' (the limit resets every 5h?)
Why are there 'Monthly Usage' dollar amounts that are in no way connected to the subscription costs, and what do they mean?
All the explanations below are just repeated rewordings of the same thing: "Go costs $10/month with generous limits and Plus costs $40/month with higher limits", as if that makes everything clear.
The pricing is opaque for stupid reasons. All the information is actually available for you to calculate your usage exactly.
- You pay $10/mo for Go and get $10 worth of usage per month
- Now, each model they make available has a multiplier from 1.5-8x
- So, the expensive ones like Kimi K3 have a 1.5x multiplier, cheaper ones like DeepSeek 4.1 Flash have 8x
- This gives you usage of $15 and $80 per month respectively
- You can mix and match
- So, you can use 25% of your quota with K3 and 75% with DS41Flash ... usage of $3.75 and $60 respectively
- You divide the two figures by their respective multiplier ... $3.75 / 1.5 and $60 / 8 ... and you end up with $2.5 + $7.5 = $10 which is what you paid
- You should ignore the requests table and go directly to the price/M tokens table where all the actual rates are given
- They control usage at 5h/1w/1mo intervals
- You can use 25% of your monthly quota in a 5h block, 50% in a week, and 100% in a month.
- If you were only using DS41Flash, that is $20m, $40 and $80 worth of usage respectively which is $2.5, $5 and $10 of your subscription figure after accounting for the multipliers.
It would be so much simpler if they credited 1M microdollars per $1 of subscription and quoted the per M token rates for each model in this currency.
But then Claude/Codex/StepFun and all the other subscription services are far more opaque.
This is quite confusing, indeed, but the limits are generous and transparent once you understand the concept.
There are two plans, OpenCode Go and Go Plus, for 10$/mo and 40$/mo.
With your plan, you get a specific monthly amount of money you can use, with separate weekly and 5-hour limits to not spend all at once.
The amount of money you can use depends on the model, but the usage percentage adds up regardless. For example, on the Haiku Model, the monthly limit is 15$/mo, as you read from the page. For other models, such as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, the limit is now 80$/mo (the increased it from 60$ recently).
This might seem odd, but the stated purpose of OpenCode Go is "Low cost coding models for everyone", so the limits on the open models tend to be higher.
The math works like this: You use 5$ no Haiku and 20$ on a 60$ model, then your monthly limit is used 66.6%, meaning 5$ of Haiku or 20$ of a 60$ model remaining.
Another way to view this is as follows: You have 10$ flat usage per month, and the "higher usage on each model" is actually just a discount on the token price. So Haiku is discounted to 10$/15$=66.6%, DeepSeek to 12.5% and so on.
Go Plus just means you get more usage, though the rate is not always 4x.
To answer your remaining questions: The billing is based on the actual provider's api costs, so input/cached/output tokens. I suppose the "requests" number is estimated. The OpenCode TUI and your account website actually show the real session prices, which also helps with an understanding how expensive the agents are on raw (unsubsidized) api pricing. The usage limits are rolling, so there is a 5-hour, a weekly and a monthly limit. The 5h is 20% of the monthly limit, and the weekly is 50% (not sure on the exact numbers).
I would agree that the pricing is confusing, but for the price you get surprisingly much usage, especially on the 60$ models. Give DeepSeek V4.1 a try, you get nearly unlimited usage and it's around Sonnet/Opus level.
As a Go subscriber, from my understanding the $10 is what you pay monthly, but you can use up to a certain set dollar amount of tokens supposedly at cost but that usage comes with different sets of rate limits so you can't rip through the whole thing in a matter of hours.
I now understand thanks to all the replies here (thanks, everyone).
But it still feels like sleight-of-hand. They’re the ones setting these prices, no? Aren’t there rules about saying things like ‘this product $10 - but it’s worth $60’!
I agree that the Claude price is also opaque - though it becomes kind of ‘intuitive’ after you start using it. I guess these would too.
I guess like all AI subscriptions there's some sort of subsidization and the rate limits make it hard to use all of the supposed dollar usage across all the models, for instance using Gemini Argon 4 on High for a few sessions supposedly used $26 of my $60 usage and burned up my weekly request limit already.
It's estimated requests based on average usage just to give you a better idea.
For some models your 10 Usd sub will get you 60 Usd worth of tokens per month.
But you can use any sub from other providers if you want. You can just log in with openai account and use chatgpt models.
It's not like Claude's subscription is super clear, either. All of these pricing models are a bit too opaque for my taste.
Yeah I am confused by their pricing explanation. All I get is there's some kind of throttling.
What do you mean there is some kind of throttling?
They've mentioned "requests / 5 hr" limits for each model, which I presume is max number of requests for that model.
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