This is pretty typical product positioning. You want to sell to both high-end and low-end users, so you offer products at a few price points. Then it turns out that that middle is a much better fit for most users. So you start making the middle a worse fit to push most of those users into the higher tiers.

Long term, this only works if you have a non-commodity, and if the higher tier is actually more profitable. We'll eventually learn whether both are true. For OpenAI right now, it's probably enough to just increase revenue, even if the higher tier is even less profitable.

▲

5555watch 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The 200$ plan was appealing because you got 4x usage for 2x the price.

Now, as it's linear, it makes much more sense to downgrade to 100$ OAI and pick up a 100$ Claude sub. (without doing the numbers) the usage should remain the same, total paid the same, but having access to best of both worlds. It should be a win for the user, and a loss for OAI.

With this in mind, it sounds like a fumble by OAI.

	▲	jpadkins 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is what I did. Hope it works out. The other benefit is you have a more natural method to avoid lock in. A lot of "improvements" to the agent harness I believe are attempts to build customer lock in.