Daily Limit :/
under review
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Kristiana Hinzmann
Why is there suddenly a daily AI credit limit? The whole reason I started using Lex was because there was no limit. I can't afford subscriptions and no other AI program has ever worked as well as Lex has.
If you're trying to entice people to buy subscriptions, I'll say that I'd be far more tempted to buy the subscription without a daily limit - but, as I said, right now I cannot afford any kind of subscription. Which sucks because I really liked Lex :/
I didn't mind the daily question limit, that was fine, but now I feel like Lex is turning into every other AI writing program :(
Dave Collins
I completely get the top X% situation, and also that you have to do something about that. But there's a haziness right now. For example, I'm only an occasional user, but when I use it, I use it quite a lot.
I'd really like to be able to check my usage when I need to.
Also, if I went over, I'd be happy to pay extra rather than having limited functionality.
Are there any plans to introduce the usage check and paying for additional credits?
Fred Rivett
Totally understand that Dave and we’ve got work to do to help clarify that for all users.
I didn’t personally work on this feature but I believe we have an email that goes out when you’re close to your limit, and are planning to add one if there’s a large daily spend. That said our goal is not to stop deep usage so we don’t want to scare folks despite the potential for sizeable monthly losses per user on our side.
Also to be clear you can always buy overage credits if you hit your limit, which we take no profit on, so you’ll never be locked out and unable to work.
In terms of understanding your usage if you drop us an email at hello@lex.page we can give you some stats that should be helpful!
Please do let us know if you’ve any other concerns, we understand changes like these are disorienting.
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Paula M
I am a paid user but I think it woudl be great to understand the cost (and environmental impact) of my use better. I would happily do things in the most resourceful way.
Nathan B
Paula M: thanks so much! We can send you a chart of your “cost per day” if you’d like!
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Paula M
Nathan B. That might be an eye opener. I am a pretty dedicated user right now updating very old content
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Paul S
Nathan B I completely understand why you need to limit usage, and support it if the limits are reasonable.
But in that case, it would be really useful for us to have visibility on our usage as well as tips on how to manage it better.
Incentives and disincentives only work if we can know what we're doing and how to change it.
Fred Rivett
Hey Paul, appreciate the support as always!
We definitely want to improve visibility to help users understand how to avoid any limits, if you drop us an email at hello@lex.page we can send you some data on your usage so far and offer some tips.
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Paolo A
Se lex diventa limitato nonostante l'abbonamento pro, sarò costretto a valutare altre soluzioni. Peccato.
Fred Rivett
under review
Sorry for the frustration here Kristiana! Understand that this is an annoying change.
The long story is that the top % of users are costing us a
lot
, and so as a business we're needing to ensure that our costs don't run away from us.We've spent a lot of time thinking about how best to set this up, and to be clear this isn't a gimmick to try to artificially force people to subscribe to Lex Pro, it's just making sure we don't keep burning a lot of cash every month that isn't sustainable longer term.
I'll take a look at your account now to see why you've hit the limit and get back to you.
Fred Rivett
Cool so I just had a look and our logs are showing that your account cost us $33 last month, which is why you'll have hit the daily limit here.
Obviously that would still be a loss even if you signed up for Lex Pro, so this isn't something we can support as a business.
This is often due to large contexts in long running Ask Lex chats, or large context in Checks runs.
Happy to discuss more if you've any questions Kristiana!
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Kristiana Hinzmann
Fred Rivett Does the daily limit reset or am I out of credits permanently? What time of the day does it reset?
Fred Rivett
Kristiana Hinzmann: It’s set as a 24h rolling window, so you should be unlocked again. We should maybe consider making it reset overnight at a specific time as that’s clearer but is trickier with user timezones
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Kristiana Hinzmann
Fred Rivett How many credits are there? I was just using Lex and I barely did anything and ran out of credits.
Fred Rivett
Hey Kristiana, good question! It's based on cost. It's $5/mo max cost, capped daily (so $5 / 30 = $0.17 / day cap). We're going to send out an email communicating all this soon.
I've just had a quick look and can see that your average message costs around $0.05-$0.07, so at that rate 100 messages would cost $5, which probably explains the monthly cost of ~$33/month.
My advice would be to cut down on context as much as possible (the last few messages had 75k context windows which costs more).
I'll flag this with the team though to make sure this is calculating correctly, as I totally understand your frustration on this, but hopefully you can also understand as a business we unfortunately can't be losing more than $5/mo on AI costs alone free users.
From my experience Claude etc have quite low limits on free plans too despite having huge venture capital investment, but if you're finding the limits here too onerous and aren't able to upgrade it might be worth seeing if they provide a better experience.
Fred Rivett
I've had a quick look and the previous messages before that were a much smaller context, and around 10x cheaper (so you'd still get ~30 messages from context that size).
We definitely need to do a lot better at educating users on this, either by reducing context sizes on the free plan or notifying when costs are above a certain amount.