> They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.

You're right that I didn't experience them myself, but my data here are (1) Netflix evidently getting a lot of takers and making a lot of money from people using this new with ads tier, and (2) the lack of any sustained negative outcry against Netflix after the first news cycle or two.

So I'm intending to rely on that rather than my own experience. OpenAI has any number of permutations of ways to include ads, including a Netflix style cheaper paid tier, so I don't necessarily think a distinction holds on that basis, though you may be right in the end: it's more intuitive to think OpenAI would put them in the free version. Though it's possible the Netflix example is teachable in this case regardless.

And then increased prices so that the ad-based one is close to what the ad-free one was 2 years earlier.

But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.