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A $200 ChatGPT subscription could cost OpenAI $14,000 if you actually used it to its full potential (www.techspot.com)
submitted 5 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] konem@lemmy.today 33 points 5 days ago

The actual cost to OpenAI is likely much less. The number in the article is calculating the API cost that a fully maxed out subscription would incur theoretically. The API token cost, however, is far above the actual computational cost.

[-] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 33 points 5 days ago

I disagree - the analysis takes as a basis a very, very generous margin of 75% on API prices. There is no way they have that much of a margin, this is wishful thinking.

And every single user who maxes out their 200$-subscription burns more cash than they take in from 70 subscriptions that lie dormant.

[-] jballs@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 days ago

I was talking to one of our cloud architects at work yesterday. They did a test and just ran in "asdf" to a chat prompt, and were able to trace the costs. It was 12 cents.

I could totally see AI costs getting out of control very quickly. Doing something like a Copilot formula in an Excel spreadsheet is easily going to run up hundreds of dollars of costs eventually.

[-] Gladaed@feddit.org 5 points 5 days ago

It's a 200 dollar subscribtion. Are any actual users around that can provide info on how actively they are using it? I would feel that at 200 dollars they give you loads of headroom.

[-] Rothe@piefed.social 5 points 5 days ago

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/02/uber-caps-employee-ai-spending-after-blowing-through-budget-in-four-months/

Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although — in certain cases — the caps can be exceeded with permission, the company says.

The news is perhaps not too surprising, since, in April, the company’s CTO revealed that the ridesharing giant had blown through its entire annual AI budget in a matter of four months. That appears to have occurred after Uber encouraged staff to use AI “as much as possible” and even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards, The Information previously reported.

[-] Gladaed@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago

This isn't that relevant to my question.

[-] r1veRRR@feddit.org 2 points 5 days ago

The actual price is hard to really know, but I think training should also factor in. The hype of LLMs is based on the fantastical idea of continunous improvement forever, so you need to keep training. Even ignoring the hype part, you still need to retrain simply to update the data inside the LLM.

I guess we'll only know for sure after the crash/readjustment.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
504 points (100.0% liked)

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