5 ms·

Still satisfied with my switch to codex/chatgpt. I couldn't imagine switching away from claude code when it first launch but with the drastically more generous

• wsatb 4mo ago
  I guess enjoy it while it lasts? OpenAI won't be able to subsidize that forever either.
  • flatline 4mo ago
    I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models. We've got near-frontier capabilities from open source models from China at pennies on the dollar compared to US big tech rollouts. OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?
    • MichaelMedbed 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • polski-g 4mo ago
        Not relevant to the post.
      • kllrnohj 4mo ago
        regardless of whether that's true or not, US companies doing hosted inference of the models coming out of China are also significantly cheaper than those from OpenAI or Anthropic
    • andrewmutz 4mo ago
      Both can be true. They can be charging what the market will bear, and still be charging less than their costs of running it.
      • wyre 4mo ago
        There is no way I'm believing DeepSeek can charge less than $1 USD for their pro model while Opus costs over 25x more, yet their price is less than the cost of running it?
        • kube-system 4mo ago
          It would seem strange, if they were operating in the same economy, but they don't. DeepSeek operates in an economy with a high degree of central planning. China subsidizes strategic industries, and they have heavily done so with AI. And DeepSeek specifically has said they have no commercialization plans. For example: https://www.boc.cn/aboutboc/bi1/202501/t20250123_25254674.html https://www.boc.cn/aboutboc/bi1/202501/t20250123_25254674.ht...
          • deleted 4mo ago
            [deleted]
          • wyrdcurt 4mo ago
            DeepSeek is not the only provider of inference for their models. Chinese subsidies likely do explain DeepSeek's ability to provide inference cheaper than other providers, but even a US provider like DeepInfra can serve DeepSeek 4 Pro at $1.30/M in and $2.60/M out. Unless American labs are doing something wildly inefficient, it feels safe to assume Anthropic has some profit margin on inference at API prices.
            • kube-system 4mo ago
              They may, neglecting overhead R&D. But also, some suspect that US models are significantly heavier than DeepSeek in resource consumption by multiple measures It’s generally established that Anthropic/OpenAI are going for all out performance with big VC dollars at the expense of efficiency and China has geopolitically limited compute and an inventive to compete on value per dollar.
    • pimeys 4mo ago
      We pay by token at work. I just finished one session with Opus that was 4000 dollars. In about three days. Now that 200USD subscription starts to feel cheap...
      • zozbot234 4mo ago
        That would be about ~300 tok/s over 72 hours at Claude Fable output token prices? I'm not sure that this passes a sanity test.
        • unholiness 4mo ago
          Subagents are a helluva drug.
      • rubyn00bie 4mo ago
        Just outta curiosity, as I’ve never gotten a spend anywhere near that, what variant were you using? Like max context window and fast mode? Or was it just chugging along non stop for three days?
        • pimeys 4mo ago
          Fast mode max content window. The task was: replace all 1600+ queries from one database to another and make the whole integration test pass. We did multiple passes, with different concerns when changing from database to another. My OpenCode session right now says $4,365.02. I haven't gotten close to this either before, but now we wanted to move fast because this branch gets conflicts all the time and we want to get over with the migration asap.
          • rglullis 4mo ago
            It's a bit of a left field question, but I am curious: Let's say that if the company wasn't paying the whole bill but only subsidizing it - e.g, if it paid 90% of the $4000. What would you do?
            • 4mo ago
    • dontlikeyoueith 4mo ago
      > OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth? Both. They are charging the most they can get away with and that amount is still heavily subsidized by VC capital.
    • schaefer 4mo ago
      > I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs. There are huge numbers of users (myself included) that do have an exact idea of what inference costs are - on open models. We can buy tokens from 3rd parties that have no motivation to subsidize our use. That's to say, there's a fair marketplace[1] and we're hanging out there. If you want to say "I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs on these proprietary/closed models", then I could agree with that. [1]: https://openrouter.ai/rankings#leaderboard https://openrouter.ai/rankings#leaderboard
    • logicchains 4mo ago
      We have a firm grasp on actual inference costs from the various open weights model providers on OpenRouter. They don't have the money to subsidize inference and it's quite a competitive market, so the prices are representative of the costs.
    • InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
      > I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models We know roughly how much these companies spend and what their revenues are. Based on that, they'd have to more than double revenue (without spending more money) just to stay even, and that's not good enough given how deep in the hole they are. > OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth? Both are true. I mean, I'd be willing to spend a bit more than I do now, but not more than double, and neither are most companies. The company I work for is currently investigating how to reduce LLM spend, not looking to spend more.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    I'm planning on switching from the $20/month to the $100/month plan. It's worth it, and I can afford it, but I am not really the right type of user for token-based usage. It's all for personal and free work.
    • micah94 4mo ago
      Just a personal anecdote but I have not hit any more thresholds or limits since switching to the MAX plan and so far, it's been worth it. But I do wonder how long even this will last...
      • ygjb 4mo ago
        I think subscription models are sustainable, but longer term, we should probably expect to see more prompt optimization happening in the providers inference pipeline. For example, unless you explicitly tell the agent or API to use a specific model, fronting the inference layer with a caching prompt classifier to determine which model to use, and automatically select the lowest cost model would probably already save alot of money (IDK if Claude/OpenAI do this on the backend, but several services I have worked on do some things like this to reduce costs of delivery customer facing inference at scale).
        • wahnfrieden 4mo ago
          ChatGPT does this and codex will eventually. They’ve stated it’s the future.
        • Majromax 4mo ago
          > fronting the inference layer with a caching prompt classifier to determine which model to use, and automatically select the lowest cost model would probably already save alot of money Unfortunately, that doesn't work within a single session. The K-V cache of a model is intertwined with the model's configuration. Switching models invalidates the cache, meaning everything up to the point of the switchover is processed like a new, uncached input token. Per Anthropic's pricing doc, an Opus 4.8 cache hit costs 50¢/MTok, while Haiku costs $1/MTok for uncached input. Model selection works best if sessions are short and self-contained, particularly if the first few interactions can reliably classify the model need. That probably covers most 'support chatbot' use-cases, but it doesn't describe the kinds of heavy agentic automation that really chews through token budgets.
  • andai 4mo ago
    A few weeks ago they massively cut usage on free tier.
  • windexh8er 4mo ago
    Agreed. I think the Chinese labs are proving that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat in almost every aspect, especially pricing. I also think people are getting annoyed with the constant lift and shift. I've seen more folks drop Claude Code and Codex, specifically, because of the lock-in it provides the providers. I'm curious to see how people standardize on tooling adjacent and if Anthropic, Google or OAI move to block utilization akin to the games Anthropic has been playing as of late. I think the end game is routed model usage and SLMs. I think Apple is going to prove this in the consumer space pretty handily and I'm curious how the Android ecosystem responds since the hardware is considerably lacking in model performance. I think Apple has a huge opportunity here, as much as I don't like their current ecosystem of walled garden. They did position themselves very well with ARM and custom chips for their hardware. Hopefully the broader ecosystem of ARM and Linux are able to make some headway and we see a more formalized, and broadly accepted, architecture to capitalize on.
    • maxdo 4mo ago
      I see exactly opposite . Chinese models fails under any complex scenarios, while us labs raise the price , that's a sign of confidence.
      • re-thc 4mo ago
        > while us labs raise the price , that's a sign of confidence Regardless of what others are doing, US labs here are just rushing to IPO. It's NOT a sign of confidence. It's the equivalent of saying you have confidence in SpaceX making revenue by renting out their data center (instead of their AI making bank).
        • maxdo 4mo ago
          going to IPO is a sign of confidence , you need to report a lot of things, that private companies don't. This is an exact reason chinese labs do not rush to go public. They wish to go , but money flow that is not as good. On the same note. if spacex is doing datacenters on earth successfully what's wrong with that? They rented cloud infra to a #2 or #3 provider in the world after < 2 years in business. It's a success, no?
  • gck1 4mo ago
    Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic wanting to switch billing to API rates is them just wanting to generate more profit.
    • y1n0 4mo ago
      That's interesting. Do you have anything to back that claim up?
      • gck1 4mo ago
        I do, and it's called DeepSeek's pricing table. At the same time, "subscriptions are subsidized" cohort have no data whatsoever, and yet they're in every thread. Granted, it could still mean that Anthropic just chooses to lose money - but that's Anthropic's choice. DeepSeek has proven that inference can be much, much cheaper than what Anthropic advertises on their API rates page.
        • nickthegreek 4mo ago
          > Granted, it could still mean that Anthropic just chooses to lose money - Then the cost is being subsidized by investor capital, but it is still subsidized.
          • rvnx 4mo ago
            and soon by everyone who is invested into the NASDAQ, some sort of exit scam, but with a real product though
    • InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
      > Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI. Even if subscriptions are locally profitable (i. e., the cost of the subscription covers the cost of inference), they're still subsidized because they don't cover training and running the company; otherwise, these companies would be profitable.
  • pyeri 4mo ago
    My bet is they'll keep subsidizing for a considerable period of time, at least 1-2 decades more. Most AI companies are just testing the waters with paid tiers right now, their greatest fear with increased pricing is folks reverting back to wikipedia, stack-overflow and other public domain organic activity buzzing back to life; that will kill any RoI potential in LLMs forever. They're playing the wait game instead, observing how the digital sphere reacts to every little increase in price. If that weren't the case, they'd be pricing at lucrative premiums already and even gotten away in short-term considering the increased dependency in the enterprise world. But that'd be like killing for the golden egg too soon and losing all long-term potential. Once the folks are so addicted to LLMs that even writing a hello world program sounds like a nightmare and coming up with an article draft feels like reinventing Egyptian glyphs, that's when the real pricing hammer will come.
    • wsatb 4mo ago
      Anthropic and OpenAI won't be around in 1-2 decades if this is their long term plan. People are not going to revert, but go elsewhere. China is proving that it can be done cheaper.
    • raffael_de 4mo ago
      1 decade = 10 years ...
  • jrflo 4mo ago
    Oh for sure. I've been hopping around from provider to provider for the last few years just depending on who has the most capable / subsidized plans at the moment. I definitely expect there will be a squeeze on subscription costs all around the industry post IPO.
• dd8601fn 4mo ago
  I have trouble justifying gpt after that gross stuff with the war department. Though the day is coming when there’s no distinguishing, I’m sure.
  • lovich 4mo ago
    pedantically, the defense department.
    • jcbrand 4mo ago
      "War department" is the older name, not "Defense department". Also, is it really a defense department when you're starting wars of aggression every 15 years or so?
      • derektank 4mo ago
        The War Department has not existed since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the government department has been known as the Department of Defense under US law since the act was amended in 1949. If you have an issue with it, take it up with Congress.
        • scosman 4mo ago
          They actively use the name https://www.war.gov https://www.war.gov
          • toraway 4mo ago
            Changing a domain name doesn't actually amend federal law. Just like how changing Kennedy Center letterhead to Trump Kennedy Center for a year didn't actually legally rename it. Once a case with sufficient standing got in front of a judge it reverted to the actual legal name on the basis that only Congress can change the statutorily defined name.
          • lovich 4mo ago
            Yea, but by law the name change must come from Congress which it hasn’t. So it’s still The Department of Defense legally. For an admin so obsessed with legal names instead of chosen ones, you’d think they’d be less hypocritical.
• knuckleheads 4mo ago
  I feel like Codex made a big push to run everything on your laptop. With Claude, I get 4 cpu's, a fair amount of ram and 30gb for every one of my dumb ideas for free in the cloud containers. Codex used to be similar, but last time I tried it just kept pushing me to run it locally on my laptop, which I really did not want to do with 20 requests going at once. That's the main advantage for me at the moment.
  • simjnd 4mo ago
    What runs in cloud containers? The dev servers, builds, etc.? I tried to quickly glance at the Claude website and it doesn't mention cloud containers on their pricing page.
    • noworriesnate 4mo ago
      The dev environment runs in the cloud. Like devcontainers if you’re familiar with that, except the IDE is just the Claude app. Having said that, I found the cloud dev environments slow to the point where I wasn’t sure if it had frozen, so I never looked back.
  • zhshhan 4mo ago
    "cloud containers" do you mean Claude Code on the web? Codex also has similar Codex cloud.
    • knuckleheads 4mo ago
      Yes, correct, they both have the same capabilities, however it felt like codex was pushing me harder to use my local desktop in an annoying way, while claude code was happy to spin up a bunch of dev containers for me in the cloud.
• shimman 4mo ago
  I've only ever had the $20 month claude plan but last night took the time to setup opencode + openrouter paying for deepseek + glm. Previous experience, while extremely awkward, I'd hit my limit within one or two chat replies and it'd take me like 4 limit cycles to complete my task. Now I'm able to complete an equivalent task entire task for less than $2 in two cycles (ask -> revise). I'm doing basic web development here utilizing animejs. Nothing too complicated (mostly saving time doing the scaffolding, still write the bulk of animations manually). Truly believe that American companies are going to get completely curb stomped by China due to greed, ineptitude, and violating the social contract.
  • simjnd 4mo ago
    I've switched from OpenRouter to using Deepseek directly from their platform since OpenRouter providers were pretty flaky and inconsistent. Deepseek V4 Flash is suprisingly capable and insanely cheap. It takes so much to get the session cost to get to $0.01.
    • efromvt 4mo ago
      The openrouter provider flakiness with deepseek was infuriating, but I’m happy in hindsight because direct deepseek has been very pleasant. Shocked by how low spend is.
    • shimman 4mo ago
      Nice, will do this this weekend. Been very impressed with deepseek. Did like 8 hours worth of work after that post and it costs less than $3.
  • nozzlegear 4mo ago
    > and violating the social contract. I agree with you on pricing, but what do you mean by this?
    • shimman 4mo ago
      Sure, modern American corporations care more about hoarding wealth rather than helping build up US society. Once neoliberalism became the mainstay economic position of the US income inequality has skyrocketed, healthcare costs have increased, childcare is more expensive than university, housing has become both unaffordable + unobtainable. By simply existing costs have increased while life becomes unstable. Why aren't corporations doing more to help workers with childcare? Why aren't they doing more profit sharing with workers? Why aren't they encouraging unions or sectorial bargaining? Why isn't the government mandating any of this? Americans very rarely benefit when US corporations do well. That needs to change. No one benefits if Meta continues making billions in profit every quarter while society suffers from isolation, depression, suicide, and scams from their services. Americans don't benefit if health insurance companies are making massive profits while they can't afford deductibles. Our society has been setup to simply extract wealth in all facets of life. That's a sick society and it needs to change. I'm not saying China does this better, in fact China has some of the worse worker rights out of all the industrialized countries; but at least American consumers would benefit from cheaper higher quality Chinese goods. The world would likely benefit too if America got off the cold war hype train that did nothing to benefit humanity outside of those making weapon systems.
• sigbottle 4mo ago
  Codex IME is just smarter, I think it shows given both anecdotes but also how OpenAI has always been at the front of programming competitions and math problems. But Claude models seem to be better at long term problems or more ambiguous problems. I'm curious as to what the primary benefit here. Are there secret improvements in training? There hasn't been much in fundamental model architecture, I don't think. What about harnesses? I wonder what's pushing the AI. It seems like harnesses is the main thing pushing AI ever since CoT.
  • Spartan-S63 4mo ago
    I find that OpenAI's agentic tools and models are better for building human-maintainable software. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to be cosplaying Apple while missing out on all the exceptional engineering required to create something that polished. Their admission of predominately using Claude with little human oversight and their stealth mode is an indictment of a poor engineering culture, from what I can surmise.
    • someguyiguess 4mo ago
      Serious question: what is the secret to getting Codex to write decent code? I am on Windows. Maybe that is the issue, but I can't seem to get Codex to function anywhere near the level that I was previously able to get with even Claude Sonnet. Does Codex just not work well with Windows yet?
      • penetrarthur 4mo ago
        I got the codex to write near perfect code with somewhat strict agents.md and coding standards(a separate .md file referenced from agents.md). My .md files have examples and a long list of do's and don'ts I accumulated over the last 6 months or so, totaling 300-400 lines. I plan every feature with it until I am satisfied with the general approach it wants to take, and then it oneshots it in 95% of cases. The planning takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. The actual execution has gotten stupidly fast, most of the times it is faster than making a cup of coffee.
• rvshchwl 4mo ago
  I've found Codex to be the better subscription for OpenClaw, because the limits are indeed very generous. However, I've found more and more that Claude Routines/Scheduled agents can replace all the tasks I use OpenClaw for, so I've been slowly switching over to Claude Code. Aside from OpenClaw, I don't find a lot of value in Codex as a harness on it's own.
• goranmoomin 4mo ago
  My experience is that the GPT-family of models are very smart and figure out bugs, edge cases a bit better, but it produces code that is much less mergable – if you review the code, it introduces a lot more useless/inappropriate heavy abstractions and wrapper functions, compared to the Claude-family models which introduces the right amount of straightforward human-style code. I can recognize so much of the GPT/Codex generated code long after it gets merged (not by me). Additionally, the time spent on every agent turn on GPT 5.5 is much longer compared to Claude Opus 4.8, which means iterating on the code takes a lot more patience, and there's a lot more nitpicks to pick when actually using GPT 5.5 to do software engineering. Feels like GPT-style models are more geared on doing one-shot software vibing (and handling the vibe coded mixture) compared to Claude's focus on actual software maintenance. I got a GPT Pro sub for free and wanted to cancel my Claude subscription so much, but I still keep reaching Claude models a lot more. Frustrating.
  • superkickstart 4mo ago
    I'm not sure if i do something differently but i have the exact opposite experience with these models. Claude always feels like it's generating way too overdesigned and hard to understand code with the vibe oriented feel while codex is cleaner and more "task at hand" and easier to work with.
    • sebmellen 4mo ago
      Agreed
  • vruiz 4mo ago
    This is my experience as well. I have defined a CLAUDE.md rule to ask codex to automatically code review, and I tell it that the reviewer is very picky and to only implement what it considers valuable feedback. I hope they don't converge over time, currently, in combination they works really well.
  • dilap 4mo ago
    Have you tried iterating on style feedback in AGENTS.md? I've been reasonably successful using this to get it to output code in a terse, non-defensive style that matches my hand-written code.
• supertroop 4mo ago
  Do you use a token service like open router or just subscribe to / unsubscribe from various models sequentially?
  • jrflo 4mo ago
    I just subscribe/unsubscribe to the providers each month. I'll definitely check out open router though, I always assumed that subscriptions were heavily subsidized by the providers especially if you're on the top end of users but maybe I should go to a usage-based plan.
• cortesoft 4mo ago
  I have been using both codex and Claude in my day to day, trying to not get to attached to one. I want to be able to work with any provider in case one of them does something bad.
• efromvt 4mo ago
  I do slightly prefer 5.5 for complex work but Claude quota usage has gotten infinitely better since the dark days a few months back - has gone from being infuriating to something I pretty much don’t have to worry about with it as a daily driver. (In fact, hitting GPT weekly quotas is more annoying now). Understand if people are still scarred by the issues + poor comms around them, though.
  • jrflo 4mo ago
    That's good to hear. It was legitimately unusable back when 4.7 was released, so I had no choice at the time. I'm sure I'll ping pong back again at some point.
• rekttrader 4mo ago
  Wait till you kick the tires of Qwen Coder.
• ProofHouse 4mo ago
  100% I constantly get errors and timeouts on single responses in Claude, and certainly hit limits all the time. Codex rarely. In fact, I bought a second $200 Codex plan because the quotas seemed fair and I didnt have constant issues. Claude is so great at a lot of things, but unfortunately Anthropic beats you away with a stick every chance they get.