The abuse is factored in to pricing and quota structure.
I have some past experience with subscription plans for a much less interesting product. Abuse is inevitable. As you do your math on the subscription costs you look at the actual usage across all accounts, which includes the abuse.
Cleaning up abuse was still a priority because it meant we could give more service to the real customers. It's a frustrating battle because you actually want to give good service to the real customers, but you also want to let each account do as they please with their susbcription. That latter priority probably fades fast for something like an LLM company when you discover that the abuse has become automated and is scaling up so fast that it's tilting the math toward degrading service for everyone.
> Fixed cost per token simply works.
As a consumer, I benefit greatly from the subscription rates. There's a lot of grumbling about how they should go to fixed token for everyone but I'm over hear happy with the subscription plan offerings while they last.
Tokens are becoming a hard commodity. Subscriptions don’t work with hard commodities. Subscriptions work fine where fixed costs/capital investment are massive and service delivery is negligible. Think car washes and Netflix. The marginal cost of adding an additional subscriber to a streaming platform or a monthly car was membership is negligible. While there was substantial capital investment to generate the models, we are learning that the service delivery cost of tokens is real.
There is a reason the Max plan gets only so few Fable tokens per week.