OpenAI Reinstates 5-Hour Daily Usage Cap for Plus and Business Accounts

OpenAI has re-introduced a hard 5-hour daily usage limit for Plus and Business account holders, affecting teams and developers relying on GPT-4-Turbo and other paid models. The cap is measured in compute time rather than tokens, with roughly 1.2 million tokens equating to one hour of GPT-4-Turbo usage. Once the limit is reached within a rolling 24-hour window, users receive a 429 Too Many Requests error until the window resets. OpenAI reportedly imposed the restriction after detecting runaway usage patterns that drove up costs for both the company and customers. Users can avoid the cap by switching to GPT-3.5-Turbo, self-hosting open-source models, or upgrading to an Enterprise contract.