It's not bad at all. You get $200 in monthly extra usage credits. Unless you are a deeply unprofitable user this change is no big deal.
Stuff like gas town is dead in the water
My understanding is that now with this workflow I will pay the same amount but get much less usage before getting to 100% for the week. How is that not bad?
If anything you might be an outlier if you do this and are actually producing something of reasonable value down the line.
They know if the value provided by subsidized usage is too low, they're literally burning dollars for nothing: people won't feel any great pain losing it one day and definitely won't convert.
Well..........
That was the point of the subscription. It gave you extremely discounted pricing, in exchange for recurring revenue.
For a normal subscription user, they would get multiple X of what they would if paying on-demand usage.
I assume that with API pricing it will run out in the first week and I might as well unsubscribe.