Friday Afternoon: I Hit a Wall
Friday afternoon, I was editing copy for a client when ChatGPT suddenly flashed "limit reached." Never happened before. My first thought: "Is my account broken?"
What This Actually Is
FT broke last week: OpenAI's annualized revenue is $20B below what they previously told investors and partners. Plain English: they promised to earn this much this year, now it looks like a massive shortfall.
Why? Two reasons: enterprise discounts were steeper than expected, and individual paid user growth didn't hit targets.
What does this mean for us? My friend Xiaolin (Chengdu, runs cross-border e-commerce product selection) told me last week that GPT-4o responses feel noticeably slower—3 seconds before, 8 seconds now. He suspects OpenAI is throttling. Whether that's true or not, the basic logic: less revenue → cut costs → either raise prices or lower quality.
Should You Do Anything?
Cost: $0 (if you're already on the free tier)
Time: 30 minutes
Technical barrier: just sign up in a browser
First step: open claude.ai, register with your phone number; then gemini.google.com, log in with your Google account. Copy your 3-5 most-used prompts to notes.
This isn't for everyone—if you only chat with ChatGPT a couple times a month and close it, you're fine. But if you depend on it for work, you really need a backup.
Advice by Stage
If you're just starting out (barely using AI): don't panic, the free tier still works. Use it until you actually hit a wall.
If you have 1-2 clients (relying on AI daily): strongly recommend setting up backups—sign up for Claude and Gemini, save your prompts to notes. Don't put all eggs in one basket. I was lazy about this once and paid for it.
If you're scaling (small team running on AI): consider whether monthly fees will rise, plan ahead. Also consider domestic alternatives (DeepSeek, Tongyi Qianwen, Kimi) for non-core tasks to save money.