Every The AI Downside article filed under Pricing — the failures, dark patterns, price hikes and privacy grabs we've logged here, newest first. 6 and counting.
OpenAI is quietly testing a pay-to-reset button: hit your weekly ChatGPT limit and a prompt offers to restore it to 100% for around $8 on Plus, up to $80 on Pro. It was never announced, and it appears at the moment you are least able to say no.
From 16 August, DeepSeek splits its V4 API into peak and off-peak rates. Even the cheaper off-peak lane costs more than you pay today, and the headline peak rate is up to 4.7 times higher. The cheap-disruptor era is quietly ending.
Sonnet 5’s “introductory” rate ends on 1 September and the list price climbs 50%. That is the part Anthropic tells you about. The tokenizer that quietly inflates your token count is the part it puts in a footnote.
Microsoft’s Copilot Credits turn a predictable subscription into pay-as-you-go billing, with the fixed licence reduced to an entry ticket. It is the clearest sign yet that flat AI pricing was the promotion, not the plan.
The AI industry has quietly rebuilt the cable bundle, one twenty-pound-a-month chatbot at a time.
Token pricing looks transparent — a price per million, right there on the page. Predicting your actual bill from it is another matter entirely.
