kind of… most of these systems, if you’re not literally paying per token, you’re still paying for a maximum number of tokens you can use, but they also often include 5 hour quota windows and 7 day quota windows. Then if you need 2x as much usage, it’s always a jump to $200. At that extreme price jump (which probably gives you 5x quotas), you’re better all paying for all the $20 plans from codex/claude/google than actually paying $200. also each model is different, so you can switch when one is down or quotas you or when one of them is just better at a task for no discernible reason (which is actually pretty common).

but to you’re original point, it’s like they combined the worst parts of subscript with the worst parts of buying in game currency.