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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

My chatgpt pro account gave me 62k of their "credits" which they try to sell you at extortionate rates when your subscription runs out. I spent two days hammering it and used about 4k of those.

This is clear manipulation to prevent me from complaining about lower limits until it's out of the news cycle, but I don't care. As soon as those are gone, if my $200 account doesn't give me the value it used to, I'm out.

The random resets are also clear manipulation in this regard as well. Rather than just give me a fixed weekly limit which I could then get a sense of and know if it's getting reduced, they throw out a ~0-3 resets a week at random, unexpected intervals so that I'll never know.

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I don't think it's them exclusively.I'm the admin on the claude account at work and I have their cheap account and never hit my limit, while others are on the expensive plan and run through hundreds of dollars of credits in addition each month. I'm not taking it easy on this thing either. I had it convert several thousand rules in our firewalls to fortimanager global rules, I gave it a personal project with a long promp to build a truenas replacement based on universal blue's ucore, webzfs and config files for nfs, cifs/samba, and s3 (rustfs) all managed through my forgejo setup with forgejo runners building it and forgejo providing the repo that the machine looks at to upgrade the base and the config (it's two seperate pathways so I can push config changes like new nfs shares without having to do a system image update). All that barely moved the needle on my account. I suspect they are all a bunch of shysters opportunistically abusing us.

> I suspect they are all a bunch of shysters opportunistically abusing us.

At this point we conclusively know that.

What frustrates me is the constant unshakeable belief here that subscriptions must be running at a loss, based on zero evidence.

Anthropic have said they have 85% margin, which presumably means their normal API pricing. 85% margin is insane. No business deserves that. We can easily assume the subscription is running at a more sane margin like 5-15%.

What margin does a business “deserve”? If people are willing to pay it, what do you expect to happen?

They deserve nothing. They take what they can take and government antitrust needs to be there to break up market failures and that is about it.

I would pivot to a Chinese provider via open router so fast... Most months on glm or DeepSeek it would be a challenge to spend $100. But now I mostly use local models... Sounds obnoxious bouncing between 2 companies who rug pull their customers every 4 months and degrade service as a form of advertising...

> But now I mostly use local models

Do you have beefy hardware? i dream of using a local LLM, but neither my 24GB RAM M4 Air nor my PC with a RTX3080 and 16GB of RAM seem usable (yet).

i could label them usable if "prompt it and then wait for 6 minutes for it to change a single line" is deemed usable, which i don't.

spent the last weekend in a rabbit-hole of which models to use in what kind of setup, but i think with my hardware i'm just out of luck for now.

for private matters I can use Cloud AIs, but not allowed to use it for work-related matters, which is where i could use it the most. they do provide us an isolated AI environment where we can use Claude etc. for work stuff, but heavily rated (about 20 prompts per week per Claude model).

You're super close on your PC. It seems like the sweet spot right now is 24gb vram + lots of RAM for qwen 3.8 flash next or a dgx spark like machine with buckets of unified RAM.

You could run some decent models on your PC l, but nothing that would totally replace serious work. Qwen 3.7 35b is pretty okay. Maybe you could try the new bonsai quant for 3.8 27b but I doubt it would be awesome.

i did in fact test different Qwen's! :) qwen3.5:9b and qwen2.5-coder:14b, i think. but i struggled with speed and them being stuck in "Hmm, wait, no, that doesn't work, let me analyze again"-loops. on the M4 Air I was able to start some bigger models. definitely the first time i burned through 25% of battery in half an hour while getting first-degree burns on my lap.

maybe in 1-2 years my hardware will be enough for fast local-AI. maybe by then i can afford new hardware. (think with current trends option #2 gets less realistic each quarter).

not sure if i lost a bit of curiosity and spark. there's so many models, tools, harnesses, tweaks for harnesses, edited models and so many things. ultimately i don't care enough, it seems vapid to stay bleeding-edge informed about LLMs, if one's career does not directly depend on it. i mean, what the fuck even is a bonsai quant, this stuff makes me feel like an uninformed excel boomer even tho i absolutely don't am one :D

not a software engineer per se so i don't need 16 agents running 24/7 with openclaw. i want a local buddy who helps me write ansible/python faster, better, helps me analyze bugs, refactors small things. basically what Claude Web does, with the benefit of it reading the files itself and running locally.

maybe i just ignore the whole AI/LLM part and just buy some new hardware so i can use higher graphics settings while gaming, WAIT NO, that market was nuked by AI as well, guess i'll continue using my i5 from 2019.

> i mean, what the fuck even is a bonsai quant, this stuff makes me feel like an uninformed excel boomer

Local models and harnesses are the new ~2010s js front end frameworks.

Either accept there's always going to be a new thing of the week and don't over-invest in expecting reliability, or work in another space.

I know it's anathema to "normal" reliable software dev, but that's what new industries look like...

Do you need the $200 sub to use the credits?

As soon as I received them and realized they expire this year, I switched to a $20 membership (billing cycle starts tomorrow), assuming you don't.

After consuming them, I will decide to whom subscribe next.

I did the same and my billing also starts tomorrow so... I guess we'll find out!

afaik you can even cancel your sub and run entirely on those credits :)

They also carefully sequence the resets so they bunch up all at once, including with the regular weekly reset.

Last week I've have about 4 resets in 48 hours:

- reset done by OpenAI around Friday

- banked reset expiring on Saturday

- banked reset expiring on Sunday

- regular weekly reset expiring on Sunday

So basically I was unable to use them, given weekend and all at once, unless you have the software factory ready to spin up...

I'm not complaining, they are free after all, but it's clear they are not randomly distributed.

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