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Comment by Lalabadie | Hacker News Reader

Am I just out of touch with our times if I think hand-wavey usage limits on a 500$ subscription is crazy?

It filter to people/organizations who have a hand-wavey relationship with $500.

I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.

Fuck, that's smart. Thank you for the idea.

Well, that was fun while it lasted:)

What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…

Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math

For example, I needed two rental cars that could each carry seven people for a trip to Maine. There's so many different combinations of ways to search for this that it would take forever to do manually. I have membership in Avis, Hertz, Costco + Chase Reserve Travel, etc. Codex with direct browser usage bypasses most of the web fetch restrictions you get when trying to use the ChatGPT web UI on Pro mode.

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve. Also set up one sub-agent to search Reddit for other people's clever approaches to getting good rental car deals. Ultimately, it found a third party reseller for Avis that had a price of $600 using a discount code for both cars vs $1,100 cheapest from Avis directly. I would not have discovered that on my own, at least not without like a week's worth of manual searching. So right there that was a $1,000 saving for both cars in exchange for 20 minutes of writing a decent Codex prompt.

Do you know about AutoSlash?

I had Codex queue any CAPTCHAs for me to solve

Interesting, you don't find that the model is perfectly capable of solving those on its own?

Or does it just refuse to try?

What APIs do you use for this?

For flights, SerpApi (to get Google Flights data) in combination with seats.aero pro. I use data from those services with a MILP library where I provide various travel and cost constraints. Runs periodically and notifies me of any good deals. I don't know if my setup actually does much more than the more expensive paid services already out there, but I can at least customize it a lot more to my liking to avoid a lot of manual search effort.

If it’s small percentage then you could spend just that few dollars in API costs or lower subscription and the rest is profit. So you're not saving anything, just reclassifying that opportunity cost to feel better about your subscription’s value. I know it's pedantic but it's useful to be aware of opportunity cost trying to trick us.

Can even have it look for (and enter) sweepstakes within your interests, autonomously, if you give it access to its own email that you don't mind getting blasted with spam.

That's actually intriguing.

I have a Grok Bot that just looks for glitched pricing and crazy deals on a list of items I need and it reports in a couple of times a day.

How else can we get these things to make us/save us money?

all of this exists for cheap without AI

I try to do the same thing, but I just don't see these very large savings. I can't even really justify the $200 or $100 tier off of it. I usually can match it immediately or beat it with just some brief Googling. I simply don't think the price arbitrage just really exists in any reliable way, month to month. Its more of a bonus if it happens to work out.

My tests in the past month, basically $0 saved over my findings: - Two one-way flights - New OLED 55"- 65" TV - Mini PC for CI/CD runner, with very specific specs - Expensive, specialized medical device - Variety of car parts

I think one problem is that I simply already know the places to check for this stuff. The more esoteric places (ebay/fb marketplace/etc) agents seem to just be awful at parsing what is real, what is a scam, what is a good deal, etc, and that is where the big deals are for stuff.

Does ChatGPT have the same large enterprise restrictions as Claude, where teams above a certain size are required to use API billing?

That would limit the $500 plan to smaller businesses.

Usage is sus but 500 minus tax write off to even a one person business that makes 100-500k yr. not crazy at all - kinda expected.

Worth it? Huge YMMV. I'd expect a $1000 sub next.

You can also right off actual $6000 hardware

Not 100% in the first year (where I live). By the time it’s depreciated, it’s time to replace. Subscriptions are 100% deductible in the year you pay them.

You might be able to use the accelerated depreciation schedule which is 100% first year

Since 2025 in the U.S. computer hardware qualifies for 100% depreciation in its first year of service.

I'd rather use the fancy models while absurd valuations are subsidising them and then pick up a couple grand worth of their old hardware in a few years when they're eol.

M5 ultra wait time just went from 4 to 8 weeks over the weekend. Can't wait that long.

  Cosmo Kramer: It's a write-off for them.
  Jerry:        How is it a write-off?
  Cosmo Kramer: They just write it off.
  Jerry:        Write it off what?
  Cosmo Kramer: Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.
  Jerry:        You don't even know what a write-off is. 
  Cosmo Kramer: Do you?
  Jerry:        No, I don't.
  Cosmo Kramer: But they do, and they're the ones writing it off.

Edit to be fair: the "500 minus tax write off" comment does make sense but often people overstates the benefits of writing things off.

Hah we both thought of dialogue play - figured it would make for an interesting conversation.

Lol, I could hear this vividly in Kramer's voice in my mind. Not everything in the show aged well, but it's still a fun watch.

I had no idea that was originally from seinfeld! The Schitts Creek version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCP27_vquxQ&t=26s

haha one of my favorites!

I've talked to VP at my company and we both agreed $1000 for the time saved, is still 'worth it'.

Dev salaries are high and devs often have to realign buttons or change colors. We are not always working on complex ideas.

I rewrote a big piece of software from scratch....it had 0 docs. Documenting of classes and flow took me weeks. Complete rewrite took almost 2 years. I am confident that with AI I would be able to get this done in a few months.

I bet it's worth it, for him.

Gets to put you under pressure to deliver more while paying you less. A few months you say, why not weeks? I'm sure the latest model can do it.

Also, forget about those "easy" ideas, if you are not on the verge of burnout every day you might as well not be working.

I mean, it's a good deal for the boss, but I also wouldn't want to waste two years of my life doing something I could do in a couple months or weeks, would you? That's not a good use of my life, regardless of whether someone's willing to pay me.

Half (or more?) of the point of writing docs is for you to understand the system better.

My take - the $500/month is likely similar to the $200/month plan (albeit with Astra Ultrafast that consumes tokens ultrafast).

Or maybe it gives you just a little bit more tokens than older $200/month plan for plausible deniability:

    Maybe me: “you’re charging $500/month for what was $200/month earlier”

    Maybe OAI: “no we’re not!! You get *more* tokens than the older $200/month plan and did you hear, you get Astra Ultrafast access!”

    Maybe me: “oh really? How many more tokens??”

    Maybe OAI: “I’m sorry we can no longer share that information, it’s confidential. National security and all…”

More than an hour after I wrote this, OAI sent an email sounding eerily close to my approximation:

    - $500 plan comes with not 20x,
      but 25x allowance!
    - also Astro Ultraspeed
    - $200 pulled down to 10x quota

Things I hadn’t anticipated:

    - one time ~62,000 credit
      top-up ($2,500 API call 
      value)
    - 5 hour quota limits removed

The removal of 5 hourly quotas can negate some reduction in token allowance. Especially relevant for those of us working in 2-3 day bursts (such as weekends). Because these folks weren’t using their full weekly quota before, they already had a decent buffer.

Maybe OAI thinks people are creating new unnecessary work to use their allowance completely. Well they aren’t entirely wrong. But the experimentation has been useful in letting us discover new use-cases, and to develop and flex our agentic muscles.

Im surprised some countries dont have consumer protection laws that would force them to be more explicit/accurate

How would that work? It's not simple to set a price, when you have a fixed asset. Seems more complicated to set price on a product (ChatGPT), where the product is just a shell for something else entirely (the model), that changes by the month.

Very easily, they do it for their API. You just set a limit in tokens.

On what tokens? The ones of today's model, or tomorrow's?

The API makes it simple, yes. They make you pay per token per model. A new model has different prices. Not being able to do that is what makes it not so very simple.

Are you serious? If you used 10$ of your subscription until 10th of month and then prices changed, well, the rest of your subscription uses new prices, that's basic math.

Just say you get $100 of credit and different models cost different rates.

but to do accurate billing, they would have to tell us when our usage triggers a guard rail and causes our query to be rerouted or denied.

And if they do that accurately, there's no stopping someone from mapping the guard rails.

Clearly that outcome is more uncomfortable than what we have now, which is enough people seem to be okay with vague billing.

Move fast and bill things

or they could simply remove the annoying guardrails

First, I wouldn't put it past OpenAI to charge even if your prompt triggered the guardrails, transferring responsibility is their style.

Second, how does vague billing prevent someone from mapping the "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" style of responses to map the guardrails?

Typically when a product is named x500 then one could assume its at 500 level or you are getting 500 of something.

I think this is the first instance where it means you are actually paying 500$

I think that 100$ subscription is expensive but I'm just European peasant developer, not SF area oligarch.

Yes, you are. All of this was obvious from the start. The prices will go up way more soon (tm)

Yeah it's wild that they don't outright state the specific usage limits.

Just trust me bro accounting.

Maybe they're trying to milk as much as they can before open-weight models cause the prices to come crashing down?

You can use open weights models right now and ignore all this fuss. And by the time open weights models are objectively and subjectively on par with what Fable/Astra are today, the frontier labs will probably offer something newer, more capable and more expensive. The models OpenAI and Anthropic roll out clearly aren’t for people on a strict budget.

Maybe one day open weights and closed models will hit the same wall?

As a consumer paying $20 now to chatGPT where i hit those gauntlet usage messages then using Muse a lot and not receiving any such messages. Im questioning my $20 a month GPT subscription and my $5 a month Gemini (Google has enough money as Meta to make it free) subscription.

Overall Ai is doing all the software development now and we the consumers are paying for this while many are out of work and if you are out of work the US tech job market is brutal!

Ai needs to be free to use without limits and in time Im guessing it will be. That could be Meta and or another who accomplishes this. Whoever does wins this race.

If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. It's like gmail is free, but Google is harvesting all of my data to sell me ads. Meta is doing the same with Muse.

Remember when people talked abouthow these models are similar to gambling. Well, might be preetty much loot box logix crossed with DLC

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