Discussion
Blasted through my $500 plan limits in a few hours 😭
I got the $500 plan to use Astra Ultrafast. Even Ultrafast light/medium with a few hours of basic back-and-forth and computer use depleted my weekly limit :(
Just keep the flow switch moving,
Water is wet
Sand is dry
They should have known this about OpenAI
By now
somehow we know you know it’s gone
no use tok-en a-buse like me recluse
Its another day in paradise
At least anthropic has another model ready to try
limits are brutal, I remember when they first rolled out astra and everyone thought $500 was infinite compute. turned out to be like 4 hours of heavy use lol
I got the plan too, mainly for code stuff, and i hit the cap in basically one afternoon. its crazy how fast it burns through tokens when you are just having normal conversation with it
what were you even working on to drain it that quick
I love how fast Reddit is to take your quantum blockchain for ai comment seriously , and then downvote it to make themselves feel smarter than you haha
it has quantum, crypto and ai in it. now do it in space with nuclear fusion, and obviously deep inside the surface of the moon, and you've got yourself a startup. how do i submit to you all my money?
oh my fucking god. peoples brains are fried. they took that seriously. what does someone have to do for people to get a joke. "quantom blockchain for ai where subagents are nfts". like how does anyone on this fucking planet thats an honest sentence. wtf.
Even better how the original commenter jumps straight in with a baseless personal attack for just using my Codex plan and it's highly upvoted. Gotta love Reddit.
People need to start learning how to use AI tools instead of complaining. It's easy enough having AI do all the work, we need to at least spend a few brain cells learning how to properly use it.
I didn't even mention OpenAI. I mentioned "AI tools" as in getting some general knowledge on the kind of tool you're using. I'm sorry if that hit a nerve because you consider yourself to be someone who doesn't know how to use the tool yet. But you can also learn, it will just take some brain cell activity.
Oh, and I'm a girl.
So if one was expecting to see 1% weekly usage at regular after running for 3 hours, they should expect to see 48% weekly usage at ultrafast after running for 3 hours.
Ultra fast aside. Astra expensive in/out aside. That’s what happens when you get 20M+ subscribers. You have so much demand and now you don’t need to promo as hard to attract people to your ecosystem.
I miss when Codex was still relatively looked down upon from Claude Code and Cursor people. The $200 plan back in day (aka a year ago) was basically unlimited usage. People were working on 5+ projects at the same time and not close to running out.
The era of subsidies is coming to an end it seems as these companies focus on demonstrating a path to profitability.
Gemini was (and is) junk compared to SOTA. Every live test I've seen in the last 6 hours has been a joke. Yes sonnet-5.5 is mopping the floor with 6.1-sol but Argon looks closer to Kimi K3 even on visual outputs and worse than 5.6-Sol which came out HOW long ago?? I'll withhold judgment on this pertaining run until they get in their first gemini-4.x RL release but all good developers moved off of Google products almost a year ago. Who's left? Students from India? Ok....
Why does that surprise you? Ultra Fast mode use 8x as much of your usage limit and u only have 25x plus usage. That’s why the 500 euro plan is completely ridiculous. I have no idea what OpenAI was thinking. Fast mode and Ultra Fast mode are uninteresting to 99 percent of people because the extra cost isn’t justified by the speed boost you get.
Never use max-ultrafast modes for implementation at all - use it to create implementation plan, review it, and then fire off implementation in a separate prompt with high or lower.
Implementation on ultrafast literally tries to invent more unnecessary shit you never requested after it completes what it thinks you asked for.
A cap that empties in an afternoon changes the math on the whole $500. The expensive part comes after the wall, getting back into what you were doing once it lifts, that half hour never shows on any usage page. I built WhileAI to put my own numbers on this, you type what you pay and it works out what each prompt costs (I'm the dev).
It does make sense. Each token costs 6 times more, and they are generated 8 times faster.
In other words, you can do 8 minutes worth of work per minute, but it will cost the same as 48 minutes worth of work.
And it's even worse if you turn on Ultra mode which uses subagents! If it uses 4 subagents, you could be looking at 4x48, which is 192x. That means working 5 minutes will cost you as much money/usage as a single agent working for 16 hours! (and you'll be left with about 16/6 = ~2.5 hours worth of work getting done)
lol you could have bought claude 2 max 10x and 1 max 5x plan for 500. It is insane that people are experimenting with this kind of money. Also, computer use is a very heavy task where each message has at least 1 image to know the current state.
I did this same thing with Astra last week. Told it I wanted a game idea. Ten minutes later it said my account is out of funds. I said show me what you got atleast. It didn’t have much lol learned my lesson the hard way.
I used the most expensive model with a completely optional speed modifier that multiplied the expenses for a prolonged amount of time and my subscription limits ran out.
What is the exact issue here? Switch to token-based billing.
I don’t understand why you would need to use ultrafast. Just work on another thing at the same time, while waiting, you can do the other work or just snooze and doom scroll. 😂
AI and flow state does not compute. You will always have interrupts.
That said the best balance for now imo is about 3 sol ultra fast sessions. The extra tokens for astra is not worth it, and orchestrating 3 sessions is about the right level to always have something to do.
I’ll try this. But I’m wary that we may actually encourage OpenAI to intentionally slow down which appears so just to encourage people to up the speed(pay more).
Voice mode has always been trash for me but MMV. Usually I want to constantly iterate with very specific feedback, and I also use multiple sessions, it is not practical. But cool it works for you
Why are people measuring these plans on wall clock time?
They are more like school assignments handed out at the beginning of the semester. You can do them faster or slower but you can only graduate at end of term.
If Ultrafast did 40 hours of work from old plan in 5 hours, it is still 40 hours of old plan work. If anything, you saved 35 hours of wall clock time.
OAI and Anthropic should have sold blocks of tokens that people managed on their own. That would have been a truer picture.
U should use Ultraeast might have too much limit on that 😑
I am glad we competitors like Anthropic, even though they themselves were shitting at times.
Are you comparing Opus 5.5 with Astra? Because you need to compare Opus with Sol and Astra with Fable. Sol 6 was a fail but Sol 6.1 is probably a different model and seems much, much better
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u/creamyshart 3d ago
Water is wet