Subscription plans are still the primary way consumers and small businesses pay for AI. These plans are highly subsidized—as we previously explained in June—but can still make economic sense as powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools. For example, the goodwill engendered by OpenAI’s generous resets is partially responsible for the recent surge in Codex adoption and has forced Anthropic to repeatedly walk back planned subscription nerfs to avoid getting clobbered in the court of public ...