Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, went on the Bg2 Pod on Sunday and said something that should have been obvious for months: unlimited AI plans probably can't survive. His exact framing was that offering unlimited prompts is "like having an unlimited electricity plan. It just doesn't make sense."

He's right. And the interesting part isn't the admission itself but how long it took to arrive.

The $200/month Pro tier, the one with unlimited prompts, has been acknowledged as unprofitable by Sam Altman himself. OpenAI's inference costs hit $8.4 billion in 2025 and are projected to reach $14.1 billion this year. The company expects to lose $14 billion in 2026 while simultaneously seeking $100 billion in new funding. Those numbers don't describe a business that can afford to let power users hammer GPT-5.4 all day for a flat fee.

Turley described the subscription model as "accidental," which is a revealing word. ChatGPT launched in November 2022 as a demo intended to run for a month. Subscriptions weren't a monetisation strategy; they were a capacity management tool bolted on after the thing went viral. Four years later, that temporary fix is still the core revenue model for a company burning through cash at a rate that makes WeWork look disciplined.

Altman tipped the direction at BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit on March 11 when he said OpenAI sees a future where "intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." The electricity metaphor keeps appearing. I think they genuinely believe it. Metered intelligence, priced per token, scaled by consumption.

The problem with the utility analogy is that utilities are regulated, commoditised, and operate on thin margins. Nobody gets excited about their electricity provider. If OpenAI wants to be a utility, it needs to accept utility economics, and utility economics don't support the $300 billion valuation or the $200 billion revenue target for 2030.

Meanwhile, 1.5 million users cancelled their subscriptions in March alone. ChatGPT's market share has reportedly slipped from around 60% in early 2025 to under 45% now. Competitors aren't standing still. Claude, Gemini, and a growing constellation of open-weight models are absorbing the users who feel nickel-and-dimed. OpenAI keeps shipping but the goodwill account is overdrawn.

The shift from subscription to metered pricing would be the most honest thing OpenAI has done in years. Flat-rate unlimited access to a resource that costs billions to produce was always a lie, just one that users were happy to believe for $200 a month.

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