That's not how pricing works.
If o1-pro is 10% better than Claude, but you are a guy who makes $300,000 per year, but now can make $330,000 because o1-pro makes you more productive, then it makes sense to give Sam $2,400.
If o1-pro is 10% better than Claude, but you are a guy who makes $300,000 per year, but now can make $330,000 because o1-pro makes you more productive, then it makes sense to give Sam $2,400.
Heck, it's probably worth $200 even if I'm not confident it's better just in case it is.
For the same reason I don't start with the cheapest AI model when asking questions and then switch to the more expensive if it doesn't work. The more expensive one is cheap enough that it doesn't even matter, and $200 is cheap enough (for a certain subsection of users) that they'll just pay it to be sure they're using the best option.
$200/user/month isn’t even that high of a number in the enterprise software world.
In previous multi-day marketing campaigns I've ran or helped ran (specifically on well-loved products), we've intentionally announced a highly-priced plan early on without all of its features.
Two big benefits:
1) Your biggest advocates get to work justifying the plan/product as-is, anchoring expectations to the price (which already works well enough to convert a slice of potential buyers)
2) Anything you announce afterward now gets seen as either a bonus on top (e.g. if this $200/mo plan _also_ includes Sora after they announce it...), driving value per price up compared to the anchor; OR you're seen as listening to your audience's criticisms ("this isn't worth it!") by adding more value to compensate.
The thing is, more expensive isn't guaranteed to be better. The more expensive models are better most of the time, but not all the time. I talk about this more in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42313401#42313990
Since LLMs are non-deterministic, there is no guarantee that GPT-4o is better than GPT-4o mini. GPT-4o is most likely going to be better, but sometimes the simplicity of GPT-4o mini makes it better.
Since we can't easily predict which model will actually be better for a given question at the time of asking, it makes sense to stick to the most expensive/powerful models. We could try, but that would be a complex and expensive endeavor. Meanwhile, both weak and powerful models are already too cheap to meter in direct / regular use, and you're always going to get ahead with the more powerful ones, per the very definition of what "most of the time" means, so it doesn't make sense to default to a weaker model.
Edit:
I should add, for businesses, it isn't about better, but more about risk as the better model can still be wrong.
If paying this gets me two days of consulting it's a win for me.
Obvious caveat if cheaper setups get me the same, although I can't spend too long comparing or that time alone will cost more than just buying everything.
And the perspective of frustration as well.
Business class is 4x the price of regular. definitely not 4x better. But it saves times + frustration.
I pay $20/mo for Claude because it's been better than GPT for my use case, and I'm fine paying that but I wouldn't even consider something 10x the price unless it is many, many times better. I think at least 4-5x better is when I'd consider it and this doesn't appear to be anywhere close to even 2x better.
Funny enough I've told people that baulk at the $20 that I would pay $200 for the productivity gains of the 4o class models. I already pay $40 to OpenAI, $20 to Anthropic, and $40 to cursor.sh.