OpenAI really does seem to have lowered weekly usage limits and lied about it! I'm switching to Claude and cancelling my ChatGPT subscription.
I've been looking across various AI subreddits, and something has come up repeatedly: OpenAI seems to have lowered the weekly usage limits for both Pro tiers in the past few months, without telling anyone and they seem to be hiding the fact they did it.
Prior to August 13, people reverse engineered how much usage they got from their weekly meter, and on the Pro 5X ($100) plan, it seems we USED to get the equivalent of 15,000-20,000 weighted credits per week in usage, but after August 13 (conveniently, when they announced a free reset) people noticed that reverse engineering now showed they were in only getting 10,000 weighted credits worth of usage per week, or for one user a 44% reduction. Similarly, on the Pro 20X ($200) plan, the reverse engineered usage limits seem to have gone down from around 53,000 credits to just a bit over 30,000! Which isn't even the promised 4 times increase over Pro 5X!
This was confirmed by multiple people reverse engineering the systems, which makes it way more credible since they all seem to agree roughly how much the plans used to get, and how much they get now. When users reported this to OpenAI, they investigated it and said they apparently found several bugs that were eating usage, and said that fixing them should make usage go 10-50% further than before depending on workload. But recent reverse engineering from a few days ago has showed that the number of credits you get has stayed roughly the same, and not gone up to their previous levels of 15-20k credits on the Pro 5X subscription.
OpenAI literally said that they had not lowered usage limits and would not do so without consulting the community, so this seems like a complete lie given the obvious reduction in usage allowance after August 13. This, combined with the less than stellar performance of GPT-6 Sol, and fact that apparently Opus 5.5 is now really good, had finally convinced me to cancel my ChatGPT subscription and try out Claude to see if 5.5 really is as good as people say.
OpenAI, do better.
Some further posts on this issue, along with related stuff:
Posted Sep 25, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC