[ifwinterco]

It's the same fundamental problem as "ticket touting" for popular events - if you sell something that's in demand at a price that's far lower than the clearing price of the market, you're creating a juicy arbitrage opportunity that sooner or later somebody is going to try and exploit

[miki123211]

Not necessarily.

What OpenAI and Anthropic are selling — a flat-rate subscription with both 5-hour and weekly rate limits — is a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

They expect some customers to generate more in costs than they bring in revenue, just like some people at the all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than they pay for, but by the law of large numbers, the mean cost per customer comes out to something the labs are comfortable with.

What the resellers are doing is undermining the labs' assumptions that every person needs to eat and sleep, and hence won't use every 5-hour window to the fullest. It's the equivalent of buing the all-you-can-eat pass for one person, coming into the restaurant with three of the largest suitcases you can find, and filling them to the brim with food, which you later re-sell at much lower prices. In other words, fraud.

[nswizzle31]

This is the same terrible analogy used to justify Anthropic shutting off API access for subscribers. It’s nothing like an all-you-can-eat buffer because, as you mention, there are limits!

We are not buying all we can eat. We are buying 3 plates of food every 5 hours (or whatever) and we should be able to do with that food as we please, without anti-consumer tactics to scam us out of not consuming the LIMITS we paid for.

Weirdly, no buffet subscriptions exist that I know of. That should tell you a bit about the viability of this business model.. it will collapse if we had to pay the real cost.

[ifwinterco]

At the end of the day they're selling dollars for 10c provided you buy them in a specific way (quotas a few times a day, and you have to not be a business).

Incredibly obvious solution to this problem: become a middleman who buys spare tokens from people who don't need them but can buy them for 10c, and sell them to the people who get charged a full dollar.

Spread is huge, so you can make a very nice profit for yourself and still make it very worthwhile for the other two parties

[byzantinegene]

fraud that cannot be reliably be prevented, which makes the business model in-question fall into 'questionable' category.

[hahahaa]

Yeah but those tickets are never a loss leader. So it feels different.

This is more like sharing Argentinan $2/m Google Premium subscriptions via a load balancer.