28 ms·

Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message

211 points by ccmcarey 6mo ago

SilverElfin 6mo ago
Does this mean there’s no such thing as a “subscription” to ChatGPT for businesses? I thought they offered businesses a subscription with some amount of built in quota previously, including for the side products like codex and sora.
- afrisch 6mo ago
  There are still subscriptions that give access to both ChatGPT and Codex, but with a much smaller usage quota than before the change (which came at the same time as the end of the 2x promo). I couldn't find the equivalent in terms of credit for the usage included with these $20/25 seats...
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
m-hodges 6mo ago
The days of subsidized access is rapidly coming to an end.
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  Good!
  - thejazzman 6mo ago
    It’s kind of a rug pull to effectively raise the price like 10x. I can’t afford to finish some of my projects with this change
    - SecretDreams 6mo ago
      That is okay. Ultimately, we need to know the true cost of this technology to evaluate how effectively or ineffectively it can displace the workforce that existed before it.
      - techgnosis 6mo ago
        Agreed, this has to happen and the sooner the better.
    - GaggiX 6mo ago
      There are plenty of good models on Openrouter that are very cheap, maybe it's time to experiment with alternatives.
      - sfmike 6mo ago
        what are some of them?
        oompydoompy74 6mo ago
        Kimi K2
        GaggiX 6mo ago
        MiniMax M2.7, MiMo-V2-Pro, GLM-5, GLM5-turbo, Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek V3.2, Step 3.5 Flash (this last one is particularly cheap while still being powerful).
        subscribed 6mo ago
        Can't judge on the quality of the comparison but I'd start from https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code and maybe from OpenRouter's ranking.
    - JesseTG 6mo ago
      Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?
      - DecoySalamander 6mo ago
        Not really. Many scenarios where that would mean spending 50x the time or hiring a team.
      - thejazzman 6mo ago
        Absolutely not. I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months. Some people are turn out slop. I was really excited to try and make some impressive shit. My whole life has been dedicated to trying to embody what Apple preached in the early days. I knew this was coming, but I thought I had a little more time to try and get them over the finish line, ya know? Maintenance by hand might be achievable, but it’s extremely hard when you’ve built something really big. I’ve only got so much savings left to live on. I’m not saying anyone owes me anything, but we all need to pivot and in a lot less sure my pivot is going to work out now
        SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
        > I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months. Based on what, exactly? It's very easy to claim some software would've taken you months to make, but this is ridiculous. Estimating project duration is well known to be impossible in this field. A few years ago you'd get laughed out the room for making such predictions. > I’ve only got so much savings left to live on. Respectfully, what are you doing here? Yeah sure, the Apple dream. But supposing AI did in fact make you this legendary 100x developer, so it would to everyone else including those with significantly more resources. You'd still be run out of the market by those with bigger budgets or more marketing, and end up penniless all the same. I would strongly recommend you not put all your proverbial eggs in this basket.
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        I’ve pivoted to writing native iOS, macOS, windows, Linux apps. Most of my career has been front end web. It would take me awhile just to learn and practice, vs having my visions working in hours or days I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I definitely couldn’t do by hand without a lot more time and effort. https://poolometer.com/ https://poolometer.com/ Is one of the things I’m almost ready to call ready. So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination. To be clear I’m just trying to answer your questions honestly. I understand the situation. It’s almost to my benefit the harder it is for non Software Engineers. But in our current reality, when I’m not launched yet, it’s more stress
    - wetpaws 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - nearbuy 6mo ago
      If my math is right, assuming a mix of around 70% cached tokens, 20% input tokens, and 10% output tokens, it breaks even with the old pricing at around 130k tokens per message, or about 13k output tokens per message. With the hidden reasoning tokens and tool calls, I have no idea how many tokens I typically use per message. I would guess maybe a quarter of that, which would make the new pricing cheaper.
    - SoftTalker 6mo ago
      Sounds like saying my plan to get rich buying up $10 bills for $1 hit kind of a rug pull in that people aren't selling them for that price anymore.
      - thejazzman 6mo ago
        The only catch is that you’ve spent many $1 and you don’t get any of those $10s unless you get over the finish line In that sense your analogy is kinda good. I totally agree the current situation is like getting my solo start up funded and subsidized … but with only like 4 months runway now that the prices are skyrocketing, vs ~2+ for a typical YC venture
        lelanthran 6mo ago
        Yeah, but... it's rocketing for everyone at the same time on all the providers at once. IOW, you are no further behind nor further ahead than your competitors compared to 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago and 1 decade ago. Everyone has the same tools you have. The only advantage you get is if you make your own tools (I did that, and pre-AI, was able to modify my LoB WebApps at a rate of 1x new API endpoint, tested and pushed to production, every 15m).
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        My comment was about the rapid and sudden cost spike of something happening unexpectedly. They announced 2x tokens with months of notice. This announced this with no notice. Me as an individual making a go solo is not the same as thousands of funded businesses having free credits, subsidized plans and bottomless AI budgets. For a short period this was a massive equalizer. Now it’s a tool for those who can afford it. That’s a big shift. — Why is it that a person cannot express their own circumstances or opinions on this site without it turning into an argument? It’s so deflating.
    - bloppe 6mo ago
      I don't think you can call it a rug pull when everybody saw it coming from miles away
      - thejazzman 6mo ago
        I avoided Claude code and such the first few months because I thought it was all billed by the API. Which I knew was not worth it to me at all. Then I realized I was an idiot and this was magic. But it now seems more like an introductory offer to use the API, as opposed to an alternative product / way to use their API product. I thought it would get increasingly expensive, like say the $200 plan becomes $400. Switching these plans to API metering doesn’t feel like it’s a separate product anymore?
        bloppe 6mo ago
        But it was well understood that the subscription was heavily subsidized. Whether or not it was a "separate product" doesn't matter as much as the fact that pricing was not sustainable.
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        It was not well understood that it would stop being subsidized without notice. Does that just not matter in modern society? I’m an asshole for expecting the product I pay for on day 1 to be the same on day 8 and 29 of a 30-days subscription?
- nojito 6mo ago
  So many folks are just burning tokens just to burn them. The infrastructure build out just can't keep up with it.
  - Bombthecat 6mo ago
    Management demands it
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    Almost as though selling below cost or over capacity will backfire if people find unexpected uses for your product.
- UltraSane 6mo ago
  subsidies always lead to waste.
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    This is false. Two examples: - https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/three-years-after-trial-launch-ireland-is-making-basic-income-for-artists-program-permanent/ar-AA1Os1Ce https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/three-years-after-tria... - https://record.umich.edu/articles/public-school-investment-reduces-adult-crime-study-shows/ https://record.umich.edu/articles/public-school-investment-r...
  - GandalfHN 6mo ago
    [dead]
- _fizz_buzz_ 6mo ago
  Although I have to say I am sometimes surprised how much people burn through their usage. I was briefly on a Claude Max plan and then switched to a pro plan and still almost never hit my limit.
  - thegagne 6mo ago
    They changed the limits out from under us, and bugs cause usage to spike like crazy.
  - vidarh 6mo ago
    I just hit my weekly Max limit 3 days in...
- butterlettuce 6mo ago
  It’s Joever.
__mharrison__ 6mo ago
For the past month, I've been claiming that $20/mo codex is the best deal in AI. Now I'm going to have to find the new best deal.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  We are exiting a hype cycle, well into the adoption curve. Subscriptions were never going to last. My next step is going to be evaluating open and local models to see if they are sufficiently close to par with frontier models. My hope is that the end of seat based pricing comes with this tech cycle. I was looking for document signing provider that doesn't charge a monthly, I only need a few docs a year.
  - __mharrison__ 6mo ago
    I recently experimented creating a Python library from scratch with Codex. After I was done, I took the PRD and Task list that was generated and fed them to opencode with Qwen 3.5 running locally. Opencode was able to create the library as well. It just took about 2x longer.
    - selectodude 6mo ago
      Which version of Qwen 3.5 did you use?
      - verdverm 6mo ago
        which quant as well
        __mharrison__ 6mo ago
        Not at my computer now, either 27 or 35b not quantized. Next week I will be trying qwopus 27b.
  - alifeinbinary 6mo ago
    I'm developing software in this area right now, so I try a lot of the new models. They're not even close for coding tasks. It basically comes down to 26b parameters vs 1T parameters / quantisation / smaller context sizs, there's no comparison. However, for agentic work, tool calling, text summarisation, local LLMs can be quite capable. Workloads that run as background tasks where you're not concerned about TTFB, cold starts, tok/s etc., this is where local AI is useful. If you have an M processor then I would recommend that you ditch Ollama because it performs slowly. We get double or triple tok/s using omlx or vmlx, respectively, but vmlx doesn't have extensive support for some models like gpt-oss.
Rastonbury 6mo ago
So Anthropic bundled CC with Claude.ai cuz OAI bundled chatgpt with Codex, now OAI is unbundling, IPO must be around the corner. Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. How are the Chinese models looking?
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago
  > Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. And I just subscribed for a year's worth of Claude... Terrible timing I guess. Do you know if the open models are viable?
  - Rastonbury 6mo ago
    Based on reading only I think a usable but a step below probably somewhat behind Sonnet. I also did read that some people successfully requested refunds late last year when their models shit the bed due to bugs so if they cut limits hard maybe you can try that
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
Skunkleton 6mo ago
The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.
- petcat 6mo ago
  > Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks.
- ccmcarey 6mo ago
  Nope, they buried the lead a bit but this is coming for _all_ users, even pro/plus subscription plans. So you get chatgpt pro/plus benefits, and then effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex
  - HumanOstrich 6mo ago
    > effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex That's not true. First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. Second, if you look at the prices for bundles of _extra_ credits and then do some math on the Codex rate card, you'll see that there's no way they would work out to be the same or similar.
    - lelanthran 6mo ago
      > First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. I don't understand what you mean here; their official comms is: Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks. To me, anyway, that means that GP was exactly right - they'll give the $20 subscriptions $20 worth of credits, and the $200 dollars subscriptions $200 worth of credits. That is what the "New Rates" are! I think it would be more rational to discount a subscription (standard is about 10% in most industries) vs PAYG and agree in principal with your assertion - they haven't specified what the discount is on credits bought in a subscription plan - but there is no indication that they are going to continue allowing thousands of dollars of credits on a $200/m plan. My guess would be a 10% (or similar) discount if you buy a subscription.
adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
Sounds like a death knell to me. If I recall correctly, Ed Zitron noted in a recent article that one of the horsemen of his AI-pocalypse would be price hikes from providers.
- cududa 6mo ago
  That guy has his own form of AI psychosis
  - adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
    I'd say he's allowed his "mostly correct" opinion on the financial situation to color his "mostly incorrect" opinion on actual AI usefulness. I wouldn't call it psychosis though. He's committing a natural fallacy where expertise in one area doesn't lend itself to expertise in another.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
  Literally every VC funded consumer product has switched from a "growth at all costs" phase to a "Now we hike prices, make money, and generally enshittify" phase, and tons of those companies are still around (e.g. Uber), so I'm not sure why anyone thinks it would be much different for AI.
  - cyanydeez 6mo ago
    yes, but how many succeed without any kind of moat or having destroyed the existing companies? I'm still running local LLMs and finding perfectly acceptable code gen.
    - operatingthetan 6mo ago
      I think the situation we'll end up in is having closed models that are fast and near perfect but expensive, and a lot of cheap open-source models that are good enough for most people.
    - aurareturn 6mo ago
PhilippGille 6mo ago
Is this not just about extra credit? So what's included in the subscription doesn't change - just extra credits are now token based instead of message based? (For Plus/Pro)
- raincole 6mo ago
  Yes. > This format replaces average per-message estimates with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It's to replace the opaque, per-message calculation, not the subscription plan.
  - liuliu 6mo ago
    It does feel like also impact the usage meter for subscription plans?
    - raincole 6mo ago
      Usage meter has always been completely opaque anyway. They could (and probably did) shrink the limit whenever they like.
      - mrtesthah 6mo ago
        Ostensibly this makes usage meter rate changes more transparent?
      - liuliu 6mo ago
        It is a bit insidious that the price hike coincide with the end of 2x promotion, which makes the usage change a bit more obscure.
        HumanOstrich 6mo ago
        It's not a price hike, it's actually making it easier to understand relative usage for different models/features.
alkonaut 6mo ago
Not only do I not keep up with the tech itself, I don’t even keep up with how to pay for it.
kvanbeek 6mo ago
So migrate to gemini now?
- matt_heimer 6mo ago
  If you use Google's tooling but not if you need API access. API access is not in the subscriptions and uses token based pricing. For development I find that the Gemini IDE plugins that have good free usage and are included in the subscriptions aren't great. Gemini plug-in under IntelliJ is often broken, etc. The best experience is with other tools like Cline where you've had to use a developer based account which is API usage based already. But Gemini's API based usage also has a free tier and if that doesn't work for you (they train on your data) and you've never signed up before you get several hundred dollars in free credits that expire after 90 days. 3 months of free access is a pretty good deal.
adi_kurian 6mo ago
Makes sense. Right now the subscriptions are like Uber as I remember it in NYC in 2014.
- rchaud 6mo ago
  Can a "tip your code assistant" button be far behind?
AstroBen 6mo ago
Things must be bad if they're doing this before their IPO
- rvnx 6mo ago
  Billions of USD in debt, a business model bleeding cash with no profit in perspective, high-competition environnement, a sub-par product, free-to-use offline models taking off, potential regulatory issues, some investor commitments pulling out... tricky. But let's not cry for the founders, they managed to get away with tons of money. The problem is for the fools holding the bag.
  - AstroBen 6mo ago
    Unfortunately the fools holding the bag are going to be those who own index funds when these companies are inserted into them.
  - mike_hearn 6mo ago
    How is it a subpar product? I've been very happy with GPT 5.4 and the Codex CLI tooling, as well as ChatGPT web. I'd say product is one of their strengths.
    - throwatdem12311 6mo ago
      Will you be as happy when your $1000/mo of inference you’ve been getting for $30/mo is gonna cost $1000/mo?
      - mike_hearn 6mo ago
        I don't use anywhere near $1000/mo of inference. But yes, the question of what to do when prices go up a lot does concern me. However, with respect to product alone, Codex is still very good.
    - surgical_fire 6mo ago
      It's heavily subsidized. I pay for it, but I don't think it's worth much more than the 20 bucks a month I have been paying. Once they start charging something that makes sense, I doubt it will be as good.
jamesu 6mo ago
The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.
convexly 6mo ago
This pricing only really makes sense if the users can predict their usage, if not people that use this heavily are just going to be hamstrung and are going to start rationing their usage.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
supliminal 6mo ago
Any takes on how Codex compares to Claude? I mostly use it to run ahead, document, investigate and prep the actual implementation for Claude. Gemini burned me too many times but maybe the situation has improved since.
- RobinL 6mo ago
  5.4 is great. I use it for python professionally and for typescript/front-end games and educational apps recreationally. In my experience it's roughly as good as opus, just a lot cheaper. It's amazing how much usage you get for $20/mo
- mrtesthah 6mo ago
  gpt-5.4 is unmatched. Claude is possibly better in web UI tasks, but not much else.
  - aledalgrande 6mo ago
    I'm really curious about how you use it, because for me it was braindead. I tried tasking it to update my personal workout app and it created so many bugs I had to clean up with Opus or be left with spaghetti. It also keeps asking for confirmation of doing basic things.
    - lelanthran 6mo ago
      > I tried tasking it to update my personal workout app and it created so many bugs I had to clean up with Opus or be left with spaghetti. I find it sad that some people are already at the point where "My only options are to leave it as spaghetti or pay for another LLM to fix it". Already their skills are atrophied.
      - aledalgrande 6mo ago
        Or I just don't wanna spend any decision capital on that? There's many apps I would never have been able to do time wise before.
hackermeows 6mo ago
[dead]
fabian2k 6mo ago
Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.
- phainopepla2 6mo ago
  Hard to say, but GitHub Copilot also allows access to Anthropic, Google and Grok models, so I don't know that a change from a single provider would necessarily change how they bill
rdli 6mo ago
[dead]
anuramat 6mo ago
from what they wrote, they're just changing how they measure the usage; might even be a good thing if you manage your context right: > This format replaces average per-message estimates for your plan with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It is most useful when you want a clearer view of how input, cached input, and output affect credit consumption.
aplomb1026 6mo ago
[dead]
mrweasel 6mo ago
Why not just attach a real dollar amount, rather than using "credits"? Well, I know why. I just wanted to be snarky. It's just that trying to hide the actual price is getting a bit old. Just tell me that generating this much code will cost me $10.
- hmry 6mo ago
  Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature
  - toddmorey 6mo ago
    You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money. And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.
    - devmor 6mo ago
      I hate that pattern so much. It’s also not just to obfuscate the spending - it’s also to ensure you already have some amount left over in your account, so that it feels like you’re not spending as much to just “top up” and afford that one thing you want this time. If you have some left over that you can’t spend, it feels like you’ve “wasted” them.
    - OptionOfT 6mo ago
      I refuse to play games where you pay real money for consumables.
    - philipallstar 6mo ago
      Board games do not have this problem.
- LeafItAlone 6mo ago
  What is snarky about that? The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers. Is there anything wrong with that?
gigatexal 6mo ago
good. just like the Claude model. getting the pricing to be in line with costs is the only way this remains sustainable.
- sdevonoes 6mo ago
  I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    > I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later The idea, as far as I can tell from all the pro-AI developers, was that it will never explode, and the performance will continue increasing so the slop they write today doesn't need maintenance, because when that time comes around there will be smarter models that can clean it up. If the providers are tightening the screws now (and they are all doing it at the same time), it tells me that either: 1. They are out of runway and need to run inference at a profit. or 2. They think that this is as good as it is going to get, so the best time to tighten the screws is right now.
    - thejazzman 6mo ago
      They could also do a plan 3 where they discourage others so they can use it to, say, rapidly build many new products but competitors would have to pay a fortune for the same luxury Just spitballing.
      - lelanthran 6mo ago
        > They could also do a plan 3 where they discourage others so they can use it to, say, rapidly build many new products but competitors would have to pay a fortune for the same luxury Unlikely that they all decided to do this within weeks of each other. Still, like you said, you were spit-balling, not asserting :-)
flufluflufluffy 6mo ago
wouldn’t it be “usage based pricing” not “pricing based usage”
felixbraun 6mo ago
5h and weekly resets remain, but the quotas are now ‘filled’ differently?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dsteel 6mo ago
[dead]
squigglingAvia 6mo ago
What if the goal was to draw us away from building our own AI data centers with their cheaper prices then eventually make us pay up for the difference?
redml 6mo ago
this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.
- ttul 6mo ago
  I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. That’s not a bad thing. Giving away stuff for free - or even apparently for free - encourages a poor distribution of value.
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    > I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. Jesus, the spin on this message is making me dizzy. They finally try to stop running at a loss, and you see that as "they've been so successful"? Here's how I see it: they all ran out of money trying to build a moat, and now realise that they are commodity sellers. What sort of profit do you think they need to make per token at current usage (which is served at below cost)? How are they going to get there when less-highly-capitalised providers are already getting popular?
    - ttul 6mo ago
      I built a web-scale infrastructure service that supports tens of millions of end users over a 15-year timeline. One of the most successful moves we made was to charge customers appropriately for their usage and to adjust how we calculate usage from time to time in order to tweak that feedback signal. It's amazing how customers learn to adapt in response to even very modest financial signals - in the aggregate.
- vardalab 6mo ago
type4 6mo ago
I wish the Chinese would release a model comparable with 5.4 and free me from this pain
- muyuu 6mo ago
  which ones have you tried? some are not far off, but it depends on what you do
  - unsupp0rted 6mo ago
    I've tried z.ai, qwen, deepseek, minmax... they've all been barely half as capable as a middling Codex model.
    - muyuu 6mo ago
      i would try kimi Qwen has also been improving recently, in fact most have, so depending on when you last tried them you can try again and see how they work for you My local Qwen is decent for some things, Kimi is decent for most things and occasionally it has been able to do better than Opus and GPT 5.4 on particular tasks it will soon be very costly to stay in just one provider
OutOfHere 6mo ago
Token-based usage accounting is more accurate and therefore more sustainable than message-count-based usage accounting. It should've been this way to begin with.
blindriver 6mo ago
I'm confused as to how pricing works. For home projects, I almost exclusively use the web chat interface to code. I haven't done anything large yet so I will iterate and get the web chat to update code, print out the code that I copy and paste. How does this differ in terms of pricing than Codex?
DominikPeters 6mo ago
In my Codex dashboard, I can buy 1000 extra credits for $40. The credit cost for GPT-5.4 is 375 credits / 1M output tokens which translates to $15 / 1M output tokens which exactly equals the API rate.
Alexzoofficial 6mo ago
[flagged]

211 points by ccmcarey 6mo ago

Does this mean there’s no such thing as a “subscription” to ChatGPT for businesses? I thought they offered businesses a subscription with some amount of built in quota previously, including for the side products like codex and sora.

afrisch 6mo ago
There are still subscriptions that give access to both ChatGPT and Codex, but with a much smaller usage quota than before the change (which came at the same time as the end of the 2x promo). I couldn't find the equivalent in terms of credit for the usage included with these $20/25 seats...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

m-hodges 6mo ago

The days of subsidized access is rapidly coming to an end.

LtWorf 6mo ago
Good!
- thejazzman 6mo ago
  It’s kind of a rug pull to effectively raise the price like 10x. I can’t afford to finish some of my projects with this change
  - SecretDreams 6mo ago
    That is okay. Ultimately, we need to know the true cost of this technology to evaluate how effectively or ineffectively it can displace the workforce that existed before it.
    - techgnosis 6mo ago
      Agreed, this has to happen and the sooner the better.
  - GaggiX 6mo ago
    There are plenty of good models on Openrouter that are very cheap, maybe it's time to experiment with alternatives.
    - sfmike 6mo ago
      what are some of them?
      - oompydoompy74 6mo ago
        Kimi K2
      - GaggiX 6mo ago
        MiniMax M2.7, MiMo-V2-Pro, GLM-5, GLM5-turbo, Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek V3.2, Step 3.5 Flash (this last one is particularly cheap while still being powerful).
      - subscribed 6mo ago
        Can't judge on the quality of the comparison but I'd start from https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code and maybe from OpenRouter's ranking.
  - JesseTG 6mo ago
    Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?
    - DecoySalamander 6mo ago
      Not really. Many scenarios where that would mean spending 50x the time or hiring a team.
    - thejazzman 6mo ago
      Absolutely not. I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months. Some people are turn out slop. I was really excited to try and make some impressive shit. My whole life has been dedicated to trying to embody what Apple preached in the early days. I knew this was coming, but I thought I had a little more time to try and get them over the finish line, ya know? Maintenance by hand might be achievable, but it’s extremely hard when you’ve built something really big. I’ve only got so much savings left to live on. I’m not saying anyone owes me anything, but we all need to pivot and in a lot less sure my pivot is going to work out now
      - SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
        > I took on some thins that would normally take 5-10 people and many months. Based on what, exactly? It's very easy to claim some software would've taken you months to make, but this is ridiculous. Estimating project duration is well known to be impossible in this field. A few years ago you'd get laughed out the room for making such predictions. > I’ve only got so much savings left to live on. Respectfully, what are you doing here? Yeah sure, the Apple dream. But supposing AI did in fact make you this legendary 100x developer, so it would to everyone else including those with significantly more resources. You'd still be run out of the market by those with bigger budgets or more marketing, and end up penniless all the same. I would strongly recommend you not put all your proverbial eggs in this basket.
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        I’ve pivoted to writing native iOS, macOS, windows, Linux apps. Most of my career has been front end web. It would take me awhile just to learn and practice, vs having my visions working in hours or days I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I definitely couldn’t do by hand without a lot more time and effort. https://poolometer.com/ https://poolometer.com/ Is one of the things I’m almost ready to call ready. So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI I agree it’s a huge existential risk that everyone is also amazing. So far that’s not true. I get hung up on a lot of little quirks, like getting Dolby Vision to play properly on Apple Silicon without Vulcan. Something I accomplished after about 2 weeks of relentless determination. To be clear I’m just trying to answer your questions honestly. I understand the situation. It’s almost to my benefit the harder it is for non Software Engineers. But in our current reality, when I’m not launched yet, it’s more stress
  - wetpaws 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nearbuy 6mo ago
    If my math is right, assuming a mix of around 70% cached tokens, 20% input tokens, and 10% output tokens, it breaks even with the old pricing at around 130k tokens per message, or about 13k output tokens per message. With the hidden reasoning tokens and tool calls, I have no idea how many tokens I typically use per message. I would guess maybe a quarter of that, which would make the new pricing cheaper.
  - SoftTalker 6mo ago
    Sounds like saying my plan to get rich buying up $10 bills for $1 hit kind of a rug pull in that people aren't selling them for that price anymore.
    - thejazzman 6mo ago
      The only catch is that you’ve spent many $1 and you don’t get any of those $10s unless you get over the finish line In that sense your analogy is kinda good. I totally agree the current situation is like getting my solo start up funded and subsidized … but with only like 4 months runway now that the prices are skyrocketing, vs ~2+ for a typical YC venture
      - lelanthran 6mo ago
        Yeah, but... it's rocketing for everyone at the same time on all the providers at once. IOW, you are no further behind nor further ahead than your competitors compared to 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago and 1 decade ago. Everyone has the same tools you have. The only advantage you get is if you make your own tools (I did that, and pre-AI, was able to modify my LoB WebApps at a rate of 1x new API endpoint, tested and pushed to production, every 15m).
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        My comment was about the rapid and sudden cost spike of something happening unexpectedly. They announced 2x tokens with months of notice. This announced this with no notice. Me as an individual making a go solo is not the same as thousands of funded businesses having free credits, subsidized plans and bottomless AI budgets. For a short period this was a massive equalizer. Now it’s a tool for those who can afford it. That’s a big shift. — Why is it that a person cannot express their own circumstances or opinions on this site without it turning into an argument? It’s so deflating.
  - bloppe 6mo ago
    I don't think you can call it a rug pull when everybody saw it coming from miles away
    - thejazzman 6mo ago
      I avoided Claude code and such the first few months because I thought it was all billed by the API. Which I knew was not worth it to me at all. Then I realized I was an idiot and this was magic. But it now seems more like an introductory offer to use the API, as opposed to an alternative product / way to use their API product. I thought it would get increasingly expensive, like say the $200 plan becomes $400. Switching these plans to API metering doesn’t feel like it’s a separate product anymore?
      - bloppe 6mo ago
        But it was well understood that the subscription was heavily subsidized. Whether or not it was a "separate product" doesn't matter as much as the fact that pricing was not sustainable.
        thejazzman 6mo ago
        It was not well understood that it would stop being subsidized without notice. Does that just not matter in modern society? I’m an asshole for expecting the product I pay for on day 1 to be the same on day 8 and 29 of a 30-days subscription?
nojito 6mo ago
So many folks are just burning tokens just to burn them. The infrastructure build out just can't keep up with it.
- Bombthecat 6mo ago
  Management demands it
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  Almost as though selling below cost or over capacity will backfire if people find unexpected uses for your product.
UltraSane 6mo ago
subsidies always lead to waste.
- subscribed 6mo ago
  This is false. Two examples: - https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/three-years-after-trial-launch-ireland-is-making-basic-income-for-artists-program-permanent/ar-AA1Os1Ce https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/three-years-after-tria... - https://record.umich.edu/articles/public-school-investment-reduces-adult-crime-study-shows/ https://record.umich.edu/articles/public-school-investment-r...
- GandalfHN 6mo ago
  [dead]
_fizz_buzz_ 6mo ago
Although I have to say I am sometimes surprised how much people burn through their usage. I was briefly on a Claude Max plan and then switched to a pro plan and still almost never hit my limit.
- thegagne 6mo ago
  They changed the limits out from under us, and bugs cause usage to spike like crazy.
- vidarh 6mo ago
  I just hit my weekly Max limit 3 days in...
butterlettuce 6mo ago
It’s Joever.

__mharrison__ 6mo ago

For the past month, I've been claiming that $20/mo codex is the best deal in AI. Now I'm going to have to find the new best deal.

verdverm 6mo ago
We are exiting a hype cycle, well into the adoption curve. Subscriptions were never going to last. My next step is going to be evaluating open and local models to see if they are sufficiently close to par with frontier models. My hope is that the end of seat based pricing comes with this tech cycle. I was looking for document signing provider that doesn't charge a monthly, I only need a few docs a year.
- __mharrison__ 6mo ago
  I recently experimented creating a Python library from scratch with Codex. After I was done, I took the PRD and Task list that was generated and fed them to opencode with Qwen 3.5 running locally. Opencode was able to create the library as well. It just took about 2x longer.
  - selectodude 6mo ago
    Which version of Qwen 3.5 did you use?
    - verdverm 6mo ago
      which quant as well
      - __mharrison__ 6mo ago
        Not at my computer now, either 27 or 35b not quantized. Next week I will be trying qwopus 27b.
- alifeinbinary 6mo ago
  I'm developing software in this area right now, so I try a lot of the new models. They're not even close for coding tasks. It basically comes down to 26b parameters vs 1T parameters / quantisation / smaller context sizs, there's no comparison. However, for agentic work, tool calling, text summarisation, local LLMs can be quite capable. Workloads that run as background tasks where you're not concerned about TTFB, cold starts, tok/s etc., this is where local AI is useful. If you have an M processor then I would recommend that you ditch Ollama because it performs slowly. We get double or triple tok/s using omlx or vmlx, respectively, but vmlx doesn't have extensive support for some models like gpt-oss.

Rastonbury 6mo ago

So Anthropic bundled CC with Claude.ai cuz OAI bundled chatgpt with Codex, now OAI is unbundling, IPO must be around the corner. Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. How are the Chinese models looking?

matheusmoreira 6mo ago
> Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. And I just subscribed for a year's worth of Claude... Terrible timing I guess. Do you know if the open models are viable?
- Rastonbury 6mo ago
  Based on reading only I think a usable but a step below probably somewhat behind Sonnet. I also did read that some people successfully requested refunds late last year when their models shit the bed due to bugs so if they cut limits hard maybe you can try that

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

Skunkleton 6mo ago

The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.

petcat 6mo ago
> Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks.
ccmcarey 6mo ago
Nope, they buried the lead a bit but this is coming for _all_ users, even pro/plus subscription plans. So you get chatgpt pro/plus benefits, and then effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex
- HumanOstrich 6mo ago
  > effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex That's not true. First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. Second, if you look at the prices for bundles of _extra_ credits and then do some math on the Codex rate card, you'll see that there's no way they would work out to be the same or similar.
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    > First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. I don't understand what you mean here; their official comms is: Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks. To me, anyway, that means that GP was exactly right - they'll give the $20 subscriptions $20 worth of credits, and the $200 dollars subscriptions $200 worth of credits. That is what the "New Rates" are! I think it would be more rational to discount a subscription (standard is about 10% in most industries) vs PAYG and agree in principal with your assertion - they haven't specified what the discount is on credits bought in a subscription plan - but there is no indication that they are going to continue allowing thousands of dollars of credits on a $200/m plan. My guess would be a 10% (or similar) discount if you buy a subscription.

adamtaylor_13 6mo ago

Sounds like a death knell to me. If I recall correctly, Ed Zitron noted in a recent article that one of the horsemen of his AI-pocalypse would be price hikes from providers.

cududa 6mo ago
That guy has his own form of AI psychosis
- adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
  I'd say he's allowed his "mostly correct" opinion on the financial situation to color his "mostly incorrect" opinion on actual AI usefulness. I wouldn't call it psychosis though. He's committing a natural fallacy where expertise in one area doesn't lend itself to expertise in another.
hn_throwaway_99 6mo ago
Literally every VC funded consumer product has switched from a "growth at all costs" phase to a "Now we hike prices, make money, and generally enshittify" phase, and tons of those companies are still around (e.g. Uber), so I'm not sure why anyone thinks it would be much different for AI.
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  yes, but how many succeed without any kind of moat or having destroyed the existing companies? I'm still running local LLMs and finding perfectly acceptable code gen.
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    I think the situation we'll end up in is having closed models that are fast and near perfect but expensive, and a lot of cheap open-source models that are good enough for most people.
  - aurareturn 6mo ago

PhilippGille 6mo ago

Is this not just about extra credit? So what's included in the subscription doesn't change - just extra credits are now token based instead of message based? (For Plus/Pro)

raincole 6mo ago
Yes. > This format replaces average per-message estimates with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It's to replace the opaque, per-message calculation, not the subscription plan.
- liuliu 6mo ago
  It does feel like also impact the usage meter for subscription plans?
  - raincole 6mo ago
    Usage meter has always been completely opaque anyway. They could (and probably did) shrink the limit whenever they like.
    - mrtesthah 6mo ago
      Ostensibly this makes usage meter rate changes more transparent?
    - liuliu 6mo ago
      It is a bit insidious that the price hike coincide with the end of 2x promotion, which makes the usage change a bit more obscure.
      - HumanOstrich 6mo ago
        It's not a price hike, it's actually making it easier to understand relative usage for different models/features.

alkonaut 6mo ago

Not only do I not keep up with the tech itself, I don’t even keep up with how to pay for it.

kvanbeek 6mo ago

So migrate to gemini now?

matt_heimer 6mo ago
If you use Google's tooling but not if you need API access. API access is not in the subscriptions and uses token based pricing. For development I find that the Gemini IDE plugins that have good free usage and are included in the subscriptions aren't great. Gemini plug-in under IntelliJ is often broken, etc. The best experience is with other tools like Cline where you've had to use a developer based account which is API usage based already. But Gemini's API based usage also has a free tier and if that doesn't work for you (they train on your data) and you've never signed up before you get several hundred dollars in free credits that expire after 90 days. 3 months of free access is a pretty good deal.

adi_kurian 6mo ago

Makes sense. Right now the subscriptions are like Uber as I remember it in NYC in 2014.

rchaud 6mo ago
Can a "tip your code assistant" button be far behind?

AstroBen 6mo ago

Things must be bad if they're doing this before their IPO

rvnx 6mo ago
Billions of USD in debt, a business model bleeding cash with no profit in perspective, high-competition environnement, a sub-par product, free-to-use offline models taking off, potential regulatory issues, some investor commitments pulling out... tricky. But let's not cry for the founders, they managed to get away with tons of money. The problem is for the fools holding the bag.
- AstroBen 6mo ago
  Unfortunately the fools holding the bag are going to be those who own index funds when these companies are inserted into them.
- mike_hearn 6mo ago
  How is it a subpar product? I've been very happy with GPT 5.4 and the Codex CLI tooling, as well as ChatGPT web. I'd say product is one of their strengths.
  - throwatdem12311 6mo ago
    Will you be as happy when your $1000/mo of inference you’ve been getting for $30/mo is gonna cost $1000/mo?
    - mike_hearn 6mo ago
      I don't use anywhere near $1000/mo of inference. But yes, the question of what to do when prices go up a lot does concern me. However, with respect to product alone, Codex is still very good.
  - surgical_fire 6mo ago
    It's heavily subsidized. I pay for it, but I don't think it's worth much more than the 20 bucks a month I have been paying. Once they start charging something that makes sense, I doubt it will be as good.

jamesu 6mo ago

The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.

convexly 6mo ago

This pricing only really makes sense if the users can predict their usage, if not people that use this heavily are just going to be hamstrung and are going to start rationing their usage.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

supliminal 6mo ago

Any takes on how Codex compares to Claude? I mostly use it to run ahead, document, investigate and prep the actual implementation for Claude. Gemini burned me too many times but maybe the situation has improved since.

RobinL 6mo ago
5.4 is great. I use it for python professionally and for typescript/front-end games and educational apps recreationally. In my experience it's roughly as good as opus, just a lot cheaper. It's amazing how much usage you get for $20/mo
mrtesthah 6mo ago
gpt-5.4 is unmatched. Claude is possibly better in web UI tasks, but not much else.
- aledalgrande 6mo ago
  I'm really curious about how you use it, because for me it was braindead. I tried tasking it to update my personal workout app and it created so many bugs I had to clean up with Opus or be left with spaghetti. It also keeps asking for confirmation of doing basic things.
  - lelanthran 6mo ago
    > I tried tasking it to update my personal workout app and it created so many bugs I had to clean up with Opus or be left with spaghetti. I find it sad that some people are already at the point where "My only options are to leave it as spaghetti or pay for another LLM to fix it". Already their skills are atrophied.
    - aledalgrande 6mo ago
      Or I just don't wanna spend any decision capital on that? There's many apps I would never have been able to do time wise before.

hackermeows 6mo ago

[dead]

fabian2k 6mo ago

Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.

phainopepla2 6mo ago
Hard to say, but GitHub Copilot also allows access to Anthropic, Google and Grok models, so I don't know that a change from a single provider would necessarily change how they bill

rdli 6mo ago

[dead]

anuramat 6mo ago

from what they wrote, they're just changing how they measure the usage; might even be a good thing if you manage your context right: > This format replaces average per-message estimates for your plan with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It is most useful when you want a clearer view of how input, cached input, and output affect credit consumption.

aplomb1026 6mo ago

[dead]

mrweasel 6mo ago

Why not just attach a real dollar amount, rather than using "credits"? Well, I know why. I just wanted to be snarky. It's just that trying to hide the actual price is getting a bit old. Just tell me that generating this much code will cost me $10.

hmry 6mo ago
Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature
- toddmorey 6mo ago
  You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money. And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.
  - devmor 6mo ago
    I hate that pattern so much. It’s also not just to obfuscate the spending - it’s also to ensure you already have some amount left over in your account, so that it feels like you’re not spending as much to just “top up” and afford that one thing you want this time. If you have some left over that you can’t spend, it feels like you’ve “wasted” them.
  - OptionOfT 6mo ago
    I refuse to play games where you pay real money for consumables.
  - philipallstar 6mo ago
    Board games do not have this problem.
LeafItAlone 6mo ago
What is snarky about that? The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers. Is there anything wrong with that?

gigatexal 6mo ago

good. just like the Claude model. getting the pricing to be in line with costs is the only way this remains sustainable.

sdevonoes 6mo ago
I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  > I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later The idea, as far as I can tell from all the pro-AI developers, was that it will never explode, and the performance will continue increasing so the slop they write today doesn't need maintenance, because when that time comes around there will be smarter models that can clean it up. If the providers are tightening the screws now (and they are all doing it at the same time), it tells me that either: 1. They are out of runway and need to run inference at a profit. or 2. They think that this is as good as it is going to get, so the best time to tighten the screws is right now.
  - thejazzman 6mo ago
    They could also do a plan 3 where they discourage others so they can use it to, say, rapidly build many new products but competitors would have to pay a fortune for the same luxury Just spitballing.
    - lelanthran 6mo ago
      > They could also do a plan 3 where they discourage others so they can use it to, say, rapidly build many new products but competitors would have to pay a fortune for the same luxury Unlikely that they all decided to do this within weeks of each other. Still, like you said, you were spit-balling, not asserting :-)

flufluflufluffy 6mo ago

wouldn’t it be “usage based pricing” not “pricing based usage”

felixbraun 6mo ago

5h and weekly resets remain, but the quotas are now ‘filled’ differently?

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dsteel 6mo ago

[dead]

squigglingAvia 6mo ago

What if the goal was to draw us away from building our own AI data centers with their cheaper prices then eventually make us pay up for the difference?

redml 6mo ago

this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.

ttul 6mo ago
I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. That’s not a bad thing. Giving away stuff for free - or even apparently for free - encourages a poor distribution of value.
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  > I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. Jesus, the spin on this message is making me dizzy. They finally try to stop running at a loss, and you see that as "they've been so successful"? Here's how I see it: they all ran out of money trying to build a moat, and now realise that they are commodity sellers. What sort of profit do you think they need to make per token at current usage (which is served at below cost)? How are they going to get there when less-highly-capitalised providers are already getting popular?
  - ttul 6mo ago
    I built a web-scale infrastructure service that supports tens of millions of end users over a 15-year timeline. One of the most successful moves we made was to charge customers appropriately for their usage and to adjust how we calculate usage from time to time in order to tweak that feedback signal. It's amazing how customers learn to adapt in response to even very modest financial signals - in the aggregate.
vardalab 6mo ago

type4 6mo ago

I wish the Chinese would release a model comparable with 5.4 and free me from this pain

muyuu 6mo ago
which ones have you tried? some are not far off, but it depends on what you do
- unsupp0rted 6mo ago
  I've tried z.ai, qwen, deepseek, minmax... they've all been barely half as capable as a middling Codex model.
  - muyuu 6mo ago
    i would try kimi Qwen has also been improving recently, in fact most have, so depending on when you last tried them you can try again and see how they work for you My local Qwen is decent for some things, Kimi is decent for most things and occasionally it has been able to do better than Opus and GPT 5.4 on particular tasks it will soon be very costly to stay in just one provider

OutOfHere 6mo ago

Token-based usage accounting is more accurate and therefore more sustainable than message-count-based usage accounting. It should've been this way to begin with.

blindriver 6mo ago

I'm confused as to how pricing works. For home projects, I almost exclusively use the web chat interface to code. I haven't done anything large yet so I will iterate and get the web chat to update code, print out the code that I copy and paste. How does this differ in terms of pricing than Codex?

DominikPeters 6mo ago

In my Codex dashboard, I can buy 1000 extra credits for $40. The credit cost for GPT-5.4 is 375 credits / 1M output tokens which translates to $15 / 1M output tokens which exactly equals the API rate.

Alexzoofficial 6mo ago

[flagged]