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.
The vast majority of their revenue comes from large businesses buying for their teams, which are almost certainly not going to juggle lower tiers of different subscriptions to save a few bucks.
If we're heading to a world where AI spending for companies will be close to salary spending - which is questionable, but is the only way future in which OAI/Anthropic survive - you will most certainly have people whose full-time job it is to juggle providers and figure out how to save a few percent this month.
Maybe. But developers are also private people who will also play with their private subs and projects. In my opinion, their private experience might influence some corporate level decisions.
Being grandfathered by OAI and happy is not the same as having both, and noticing "hmm maybe Claude is much better for my case, Ill suggest that to our manager"
Every dev I've worked with hates Jira and yet it's by far the dominant project management system for software companies. Software devs don't have as much sway as you think at most companies. (I realize that the cost of switching from Jira is higher than the cost of switching LLM providers, but I think the point still applies. I've seen this same behavior with dev tools as well.)
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.
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.