Dev Slams AI Labs' Premium Price Discrimination: Credits Expire in a Week, Slow Models
NYCounihan · x · 2026-10-19
The poster accuses AI labs of playing an increasingly refined game of price discrimination: subscription credits only last a week, users are routed to seemingly "deliberately slowed" models within their quota, and pricing and usage rules change constantly — which led him to bounce back and forth between Claude and Codex over the past year.
He eventually switched to the PI coding agent that serves models via AWS Bedrock, noting that it's worth doubting whether even models served through third-party providers (like AWS) actually hit the advertised speed and performance. He hopes someone will build a quick coding benchmark tool for real-world AI API speed and performance — though he doesn't want to build it himself.
Related event: Developers accuse AI labs of fine-grained price discrimination(2 posts)→
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