This is not a rant, despite the fact I woke up to find out the demo I intended to use to seek startup founding doesn’t work anymore due to OpenAI’s new request per minute limits on the different tiers. My app works in “burst mode” where it needs 9 images at a time in a real-time virtual world, and then no requests for a long period of time. OpenAI’s painfully low request per minute limits for Dalle-3 make apps like mine unworkable. To get to the necessary RQM level I have to pay for at least Tier 4, and even that would be somewhat painful for demos, and that would mean shelling out $250 a month just to give a few demos each month, despite the fact the sum of total usage across those demos would fit well within the Tier 1 monthly dollar usage limit.
Meanwhile, Amazon Bedrock’s TitanX service has a flat 60 RQMs limit, pay as you go.
As I said, I love OpenAI’s API products, but there is obviously no other choice for me. I know that no one at OpenAI will ever care about my usage case, but they are effectively “gentrifying” the entire Dalle-3 developer space with this bewildering policy that favors one app usage case over another and definitely favors well capitalized businesses over pre-seed startups, despite the exact same overall image generation demands.
I think you misunderstand the tiers. It is a trust level you have attained by your entire past payment history and waiting period. Essentially if your account has “$250 paid and 14+ days since first successful payment” (and then you make another small payment for recalculation after day 15), your account is permanently tier 4+ from having paid that balance in the past.
Putting $250+ into their system still means you need relatively high use to employ your money, as prepaid credits expire within a year and are non-refundable.
Thank you for that clarification but as you said at the end of your post, it is still an awkward gamble. Also, they could change their limits again at anytime and I’ve been burned now in a way that, as a fellow developer, I believe you know the confidence hit that brings. I’m one of the developers that was part of the second wave of beta participants and have been a loyal user of their products since. Now, after firing up my app to show it to a potential investor and being immediately being hit with a flurry of embarrassing 429 errors, I am uncertain. Again, I do appreciate you explaining things to me.
I give $5 to Anthropic, I essentially have no rate limit and can empty my account in a minute. That is, until yesterday, when they now copy this dark pattern. Now just Mistral is a democratic competitor.
My limit on DALL-E ranges from $2 minute - $6 minute based on “calls” and not cost or computation. And someone that has sent OpenAI $200 only gets 14% of that? Dumb.
The only obvious motivation is to get more cash into OpenAI bank accounts now. They are even giving enticement offers by email to get people to buy credits now. Is it in anticipation of shutting off the only good models in months? Lock-in to prevent fleeing when services are bypassed in quality? The only way to turn Microsoft’s “investment” of Azure into cash?
Holy cow! I followed your “until yesterday” and I had to double check to make sure I wasn’t looking at the same rate limits page. Anthropic event copied the tabbed “Tiers table”. The only difference is they have 4 tiers and OpenAI has five but I would not be surprised if the Anthropic folk were looking at the OpenAI page when they made their page and their limit strategy.
Well, I guess it only took a year to go from the democratization of AI to the gentrification of AI. The effect on the market will of course be that only large corporations that can shoulder a significant AI services bill will be able to provide the key apps that get wide scale adoption, since they can make their profits elsewhere and not directly off the repackaging of the AI service into a focused app. The rest of us will use it for personal development or hope to build something that gets acquired.