The 2x allowance last month was not of the goodness of their hearts. It’s pumping up the demand AND the revenue simultaneously. The squeeze before an IPO.
How many of us have looked into moving to the next tier during the last 48 hours? I know I have both professionally and for my private use. Moving 20% of $20 customers to $100 increases the revenue for the group with 1.8x.
I've cancelled my account and when it's finished in a few days I'm done with Claude. Sure, Opus has a slight edge (which might just be familiarity) but it's already clear that pi with Gemini 3.1 pro or codex 5.3 is pretty much close.
Now you spend 2x tokens to achieve the same result because of that.
Sure, you can tell it to "be succinct" or whatever, but the vast majority of people won't so this definitely increased token consumption overall.
This only makes sense if openai was cutting the quotas to below the original amount, which so far as I can tell hasn't happened. Otherwise it's just a cynical take where any sort of promotion can be cynically interpreted as "Manufacturing demand. Create the problem. Solve the problem".