this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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[โ€“] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

There was an article yesterday that if you sign up for the most expensive OpenAI plan and actually use it fully, OpenAI loses $14k a year on you.

This reminds me of the early Internet days. I ran an ISP. Like everyone else we offered "unlimited" service. But if everyone actually used unlimited we would have been bankrupted because it would tie up a phone line (channel of a pri) and modem on the portmaster. Regular users only used 1/10th of "unlimited".

[โ€“] GalacticRobot@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago

Isn't that basically every 'all you can eat' model though? 20% of people will fully max their usage, causing a loss, but the 80% of users will use far less than the purchase price, netting $$$ for the company. When that balance shifts, most places just put more limits to that 'all you can eat' or raise prices. Sure, I have unlimited internet, but it's difficult to symmetrically max out my 5gbit connection to get that full 'cost' each month.

As long as OpenAI has a health amount of money in the bank ($50 billion it seems), they have a long time to burn money, and then you just keep getting people to invest. Pretty sure that's been the model of every tech company for a long time. I think Uber took almost 15 years to be profitable, and had almost $50 billion invested. For a company that owns essentially zero cars, pretty wild.

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