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

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001106-codex-rate-card

by ccmcarey • 4 months ago

211 193 4 months ago

help.openai.com

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• 4 months 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...

m-hodges• 4 months ago

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

LtWorf• 4 months ago

Good!

thejazzman12• 4 months 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

nojito• 4 months ago

So many folks are just burning tokens just to burn them.

The infrastructure build out just can't keep up with it.

Bombthecat• 4 months ago

Management demands it

fc417fc802• 4 months ago

Almost as though selling below cost or over capacity will backfire if people find unexpected uses for your product.

UltraSane• 4 months ago

subsidies always lead to waste.

subscribed2• 4 months ago

This is false.

Two examples:

- https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/three-years-after-tria...

- https://record.umich.edu/articles/public-school-investment-r...

_fizz_buzz_• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

They changed the limits out from under us, and bugs cause usage to spike like crazy.

vidarh• 4 months ago

I just hit my weekly Max limit 3 days in...

butterlettuce• 4 months ago

It’s Joever.

Rastonbury2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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?

Rastonbury2• 4 months 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

__mharrison__4• 4 months 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.

verdverm4• 4 months 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__4• 4 months 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.

alifeinbinary• 4 months 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.

piyh2• 4 months ago

Already paying for Google photo storage, AI pro for an extra $7 is a steal with anti-gravity.

matt_heimer3• 4 months ago

That's only good for the web based UI. If you want Gemini API access which is what this article is about then you must go the AIStudio route and pricing is API usage based. It does have a free usage tier and new signups can get $300 in free credits for the paid tier so it's I think it's still a good deal, just not as good as using the subscriptions would be.

purrcat259• 4 months ago

Good luck sticking within limits, I have been burning up my baseline limits insanely fast within a few prompts, a marked change from a few weeks ago.

There's a few complaints online about the same happening to multiple users.

Otherwise anti-gravity has been great.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 months ago

I bought one of the google AI packages that came with a pile of drive storage and Gemini access.

Unfortunately gemini as a coding agent is a steaming useless pile. They have no right selling it, cheap open weight Chinese models are better at this point.

It's not stupid it just is incompetent at tool use and makes bad mistakes. It constantly gets itself into weird dysfunctional loops when doing basic things like editing files.

I'm not sure what GOOG employees are using internally, but I hope they're not being saddled with Gemini 3.1. It's miles behind.

scosman2• 4 months ago

Check out z.ai coder plan. The $27/mo plan is roughly the same usage as the 20x $200 Claude plan. I have both and Claude is a little better, but GLM 5.1 is much better value.

rustyhancock• 4 months ago

Agreed, I use Z.ai and the usage is fantastic the only temper that recommendation that it's often unreliable. Perhaps a few times per week it's unresponsive. Maybe more often it seems to become flakey.

It's very variable though recently I'm noticing it's more reliable but there was a patch where it was nearly unusable some days.

I guess I won't complain for the price and YMMV.

mickeyp• 4 months ago

If you're ok with a model provider that goes down all the time and has such a poor inference engine setup that once you get past 50k tokens you're going to get stuck in endless reasoning loops.

aulin2• 4 months ago

GH Copilot is still the best deal, while it lasts

__mharrison__4• 4 months ago

Yeah, it's really good. Probably going to be the next best deal until they cut back.

I need to try the command line version.

hokkos• 4 months ago

I feel they will go token base at some point, currently if you only use it with precise prompts and not random suggestions, switch between models 5.4 and 5.4 mini depending on the work, it is the best deal.

muyuu4• 4 months ago

What has actually changed? It's unclear how much can you do right now, unless they've already switched you to the new plan and you're speaking from experience.

Skunkleton• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

HumanOstrich4• 4 months 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.

mandeepj• 4 months ago

effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex

So, 1.3ish million tokens for Codex? Following the token limit from here https://openai.com/api/pricing/

adamtaylor_133• 4 months 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.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 months 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.

cyanydeez2• 4 months 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.

lelanthran15• 4 months ago

Those companies at least had somewhat of a moat.

As I see it, the only thing close to a moat is CC for Anthropic, and since it is a big ol' fucking mess that is a) apparently now beyond the ability of any current SOTA LLM to fix, and b) understood by absolutely no human, I'd say it's not much of a moat. The other agents will catch up sooner rather than later.

The other providers? I don't see a moat. We jump ship at the drop of a hat.

cududa• 4 months ago

That guy has his own form of AI psychosis

adamtaylor_133• 4 months 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.

supliminal3• 4 months ago

Every time an Ed Zitron article is posted on HN, it is met with a torrent of vitriol and personal attacks. The articles are okay if not overly wordy but I don’t see how the subject matter elicits that strong of a response.

At any rate, this observation is not unique to Ed, lots of people have made the same conclusion that the math doesn’t add up from a business profitability perspective.

SlinkyOnStairs4• 4 months ago

The articles are okay if not overly wordy but I don’t see how the subject matter elicits that strong of a response.

Hot take, but really it's more of an observation than a take: We saw this exact response in Blockchain & crypto circles a few years ago. (Though HN wasn't quite as culturally "central" to those)

Economic Bubbles are subject to the Tinkerbell Effect. They exist so long as people exist in them, and collapse when either 1) They become so financially unsustainable as to collapse, having consumed all the money the economy could possibly give them, or 2) People stop believing in the bubble and stop feeding it money.

In this regard, the statement "NTFs are stupid" was not merely ridiculing those who bought them, but a direct attack on the bubble and those invested in it. And this is something the people involved in the bubble understand instinctively, even if they aren't consciously aware of it. (There's a psychological mechanism to that, but it's not relevant)

So consequently, they react aggressively to dissent. They seek to enforce their narrative, because not doing so is a threat to the bubble and their financial interests.

---

AI's not much different to that. It's clearly a bubble to everyone including the AI execs saying it out loud.

And people react aggressively to dissent like Ed's, because if the wider public stops believing in AI's future, the bubble bursts. They'll stop tolerating datacenter construction, they'll sell their Nvidia shares, they'll demand regulators restrict AI.

(And to those who can feel their aggression rising reading this comment. Hi, yes. I see you. If I were wrong, nothing I said would matter. You'd be wasting your time engaging with it, history would simply prove me wrong. But by all means, type up that reply or click that button.)

georgemcbay• 4 months ago

I agree with Ed Zitron more often than not, but I do think he Flanderized himself into being the aggressively-anti-AI-guy to the point where he now makes claims about the capabilities of "AI" that are incorrect regularly. I see people on HN doing the same thing, making claims about capabilities that were true as recently as 6 months ago, but aren't true anymore.

[I'm an AI-doomer myself, but I am an AI-doomer because by and large this stuff increasingly works, not because it doesn't.]

That said, Ed Zitron still does a lot of useful research into the economics of the industry and I also believe that continued progress in AI can disrupt the world (for better and for worse) while the economics propping up all the frontier model providers can also implode spectacularly.

Some people talk about how AI doom comes about either way because it could take all of our jobs OR crash the economy when the current bubble bursts. But as an uber-AI-doomer I happen to think there is a very real possibility of a double downside (for the labor class, at least) where both of those things can happen at the same time!

BoggleOhYeah• 4 months ago

A lot of HN posters are fighting for their employer and/or investments.

lelanthran15• 4 months ago

The articles are okay if not overly wordy

Did you mean instead "The articles are okay if overly wordy"?

adamtaylor_133• 4 months ago

Yeah I've noticed this phenomenon as well. Frankly, I expected to be downvoted into oblivion just for mentioning him. But Zitron's commentary on the financial implications of AI usually reads as common sense to me and checks out (granted I'm not really capable of refuting his points.)

surgical_fire2• 4 months ago

Every time an Ed Zitron article is posted on HN, it is met with a torrent of vitriol and personal attacks.

It's why I started to pay attention to what he says.

Dude is a bit verbose, but his rationale is solid. If it gets the panties of some people here in a bunch, he may be on to something.

PhilippGille• 4 months 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)

raincole2• 4 months 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.

liuliu2• 4 months ago

It does feel like also impact the usage meter for subscription plans?

nba456_• 4 months ago

God every single title I read about AI on this site ends up being a straight up lie.

sixtyj• 4 months ago

I miss “BREAKING NEWS” as it is used at X /s

camdenreslink• 4 months ago

I think this might also impact how usage is calculated for subscription plans as well, not just overages (using tokens instead of messages for calculating usage). But the message from OpenAI seems vague.

johanyc• 4 months ago

Looks like it yes. I can't believe I have to scroll this far too find this comment.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12642688-using-credits-f...

alkonaut• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

So migrate to gemini now?

matt_heimer3• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

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

rchaud• 4 months ago

Can a "tip your code assistant" button be far behind?

AstroBen3• 4 months ago

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

rvnx• 4 months 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.

AstroBen3• 4 months ago

Unfortunately the fools holding the bag are going to be those who own index funds when these companies are inserted into them.

mike_hearn2• 4 months 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.

timacles• 4 months ago

Yeah you guys have to pay attention to the state of the overall economy. We are in the credit-crunch phase of a recession. The funny money has ran out and infinite loans are no longer available. These companies have to find way to pay their debt now

convexly• 4 months 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.

jamesu• 4 months 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.

supliminal3• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

mrtesthah2• 4 months ago

gpt-5.4 is unmatched. Claude is possibly better in web UI tasks, but not much else.

aledalgrande2• 4 months 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.

throwatdem123112• 4 months ago

There basically the same. Codex is better at some things, Claude is better at other things. It’s honestly a wash, just pick the one that gives you a warmer fuzzy feeling in your tummy.

kristofferR• 4 months ago

Codex has better quality and way more usage, but Claude Code is more pleasant to interact with and use in a lot of tiny ways

fabian2k• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

anuramat2• 4 months 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.

mrweasel• 4 months 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.

hmry2• 4 months ago

Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature

toddmorey• 4 months 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.

LeafItAlone• 4 months 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?

SlinkyOnStairs4• 4 months ago

A fundamental architectural problem is that they genuinely do not know what a query will cost ahead of time.

Even for a single standalone LLM that's the case, and the 'agentic' layers thrown on top just make that problem exponentially worse.

One'd need to entirely switch away from LLMs to fix this problem.

babyshake• 4 months ago

Isn't this an orthogonal issue that doesn't affect whether billing is done with credits or money?

zozbot2342• 4 months ago

If the expensive parts of the query happen to work iteratively (especially if agentic), you can act on those loops to bound the cost. Even if it's pure forward generation, you could pause an expensive inference and continue it seamlessly with a cheaper model, adding little to the cost.

fauigerzigerk• 4 months ago

I can think of a few other reasons:

- Not everyone uses dollars.

- The price of credits in some currency could change after you bought them.

- The price of credits could be different for different customers (commercial, educational, partners, etc)

- They can ban trading of credits or let them expire

hmry2• 4 months ago

Not everyone uses dollars.
The price of credits in some currency could change after you bought them.
The price of credits could be different for different customers (commercial, educational, partners, etc)

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't every other compute provider manage that without introducing their own token currency? Convert to the user's currency at the end of the month, when the invoice comes in. On the pricing page, have a table that lists different prices for different customers. I fail to see how tokens make it clearer. Compare:

"This action costs 1 token, and 1 token = $0.03 for educational in the US, or 0.05€ for commercial in the EU"

"This action costs $0.03 for educational in the US, or 0.05€ for commercial in the EU"

They can ban trading of credits or let them expire

That sounds extremely user-hostile to me

predkambrij• 4 months ago

Taximeter effect

gigatexal• 4 months ago

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

sdevonoes• 4 months ago

I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later

lelanthran15• 4 months 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.

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.

flufluflufluffy• 4 months ago

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

felixbraun• 4 months ago

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

squigglingAvia• 4 months 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?

redml2• 4 months 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.

ttul2• 4 months 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.

lelanthran15• 4 months 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?

vardalab• 4 months ago

What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.

lelanthran15• 4 months ago

They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.

That's the problem - these small businesses are writign code, models from last year are good enough for them, and as a small business they can easily shell out for hardware to self-host.

The minute businesses take-up AI for their business processed, the will to buy each employee a subscription is going to go the way of the dodo.

redml2• 4 months ago

Honestly? It was the claude code leak that did it. There was a lot more smoke and mirrors than I anticipated, the poisoning tool calls, how their prompting is, how "messy" a lot of it was etc.

I meant that I thought the exponential with the models is slowing down (AGI, etc). The application though for regular people will continue to go forward.

zozbot2342• 4 months ago

this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down

I've also heard that, we're near the end of the exponential.

muyuu4• 4 months ago

I don't think there has been any exponential in terms on inference costs in the last couple of years. In fact, they have worsened as the same relevant hardware is more expensive and so is energy - and to top it off, to stay SotA companies are using larger models with higher running costs. But for some reason people are conflating the improvements in models with the cost of inference.

type4• 4 months ago

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

muyuu4• 4 months ago

which ones have you tried? some are not far off, but it depends on what you do

unsupp0rted• 4 months ago

I've tried z.ai, qwen, deepseek, minmax... they've all been barely half as capable as a middling Codex model.

OutOfHere• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

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

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