API pricing itself might have extreme margins compared to the real cost. Anyway, in my testing the Pro 20x $200 plan gives you about $2200 API-equivalent weekly usage if you're only using GPT 5.6 Sol, so quite close to $9k-$10k/month API-equivalent, it's a bit inconsistent with cache costs.

It's very interesting that for Anthropic the $100 and $200 plans only differ 2x in weekly limits, the 5 hour limit differences are more severe. But for OpenAI, Pro 20x is, well, 4x of Pro 5x for only 2x cost. So, for example, 100% of weekly usage for Codex on a Plus ($20) account is just 5% of weekly usage for Codex on Pro 20x.

And you can calculate how much extra usage you can get from resets, and especially banked resets by purposefully using the whole quota and using your banked reset - they expire 30 days after they're given out, so if you don't use one, it just disappears.

Curious, does Anthropic force companies of a certain size like yours to their Enterprise plans? Or was it by choice for the enterprise features?

Because with a Premium Team seat I run 2-3 vscodes with Opus 4.8 Max all day and never seem to hit my limits.

Kicking myself that I didn't use one of my 4 resets which just expired, but then again, they reset our usage anyway. We are just blasting away with 5.6-Sol-ultra, doing a project I wouldn't have otherwise done (basically drastically editing someone's novel for them and adding illustrations).

yes but as a normal user your data and traces are being used to train AI which helps enterprise customers.

> Point being my real API usage here must be very unsustainable!

I think it’s funny that everyone anchors to the API pricing as the real cost.

Most likely is that their API costs are printing profits. They can sell the subscription plans at a slight loss because it gets more people like you hooked on GPT models at home and suggesting them at work, where the real money is made.

I think their subscription plans go mostly unused when averaged across all subscribers, too. Some customers are getting great deals by maxing out 100% every week, but most probably use much less.

The reset game is an addictive challenge that gets the hardcore users more hooked on their products because you feel pressured to use it as much as you can before the next unpredictable surprise reset lands.

> At my $COMPANY, we have claude enterprise at API pricing. I've blown through $10k already this month, opting for Opus 4.8 w/ Sonnet 5 agents where possible.

A very happy gambler of tokens at the Anthropic casino, running up costs on the house at no cost to them, but to $COMPANY paying.

My usage sky rocketed with GPT 5.6 sol thanks to all these resets. I'm pretty sure this is not sustainable for me.

Here it's only Microsoft (ghcp) allowed, and 39$ per month is considered ludicrous with no way to increase. Ah Europe

$10,000 in less than three weeks is incredible. The bean counters sure have a blind spot for AI…

This is the Kimi and GLM effect.

Open Source is coming.

All these resets are given because of rival competition. When they win the market, we are going to be squeezed $$$.

They can do it often because they have compute, and they have compute mostly because they are pretty far behind Anthropic when it comes to heavy enterprise users. They’ve supposedly added several million since 5.6 launch, which is a steep growth curve. We will see if those users stick around. Anecdotally, I’ve stopped using it for anything major because it has attempted to do some very unsafe things when I wasn’t looking. Friends I’ve talked to have also gotten over the initial honeymoon period.

tbf they turned previous ChatGPT macOS app into Codex, so getting a "new" Codex user might mean someone using ChatGPT just updated their app.

I was thinking about this. How do they measure this? Every upgrade of the ChatGPT apps get counted?

They just merged the ChatGPT app and the Codex app into one super app.

It is a clever growth hack.

The 5h limit is gone (for now). It does not presently need to be chased. :)

For the automated checking of other stuff: It was a one-shot prompt to get Codex clank up some Python that returns remaining usage, next reset time/date, and so on.

The result does use Codex App Server, but it's a short-lived process that is dealt with over stdio so that's... fine-ish, I guess?

I keep this bookmarked and check it frequently

https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/analytics

Check this site for the first part? Maybe they can offer a notifications API, hah.

Ant is not giving lot of gifts though :(

Oh, they have free drops too? I guess dual wielding the two $20 subs is the best value option right now then.

I've had this too on my personal pro plan and also when I run the usage command it says it's resetting tomorrow rather than getting cut off.

I'm trying to squeeze what I can in the meantime but I feel like they said it was getting cut off multiple times and they keep extending and possibly resetting it (havent been looking close enough to know for sure)

Nope. Anthropic is incredibly greedy and always has been.

It did once. That's all I know of though. Nothing like Codex.

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Originally yes, everyone's usage limit went back to 100% at the same time regardless of if you were at 0% or 99%. Now they tend to give out "banked" resets where users can choose when to use it for up to a month (except the most recent one, which I think was non-banked)

My next question is: why? Purely marketing tactics?

To be fair, they're motivating me to move from the Pro to the Max tier (the $200 one, which has 4X the usage of Pro for 2X the price).

Yup! Big beautiful burning pile of cash. Though there’s some nuance with subsidizing inference (which is supposed to make them money long term) vs training (which we’re supposed to ignore I guess).

We lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume

And they can’t stop because they want to IPO soon, and stopping this madness would signal loudly that they are bleeding cash, don’t really have a business model, and might not be worth $2 trillion after all.

Are Codex users even a drop in the bucket of overall use? I mean, it's a pretty specific way to interact with the bot.

Codex usage is clearly common enough to have entered the vernacular of folks here on HN.

But we aren't everyone, and it seems likely to me that there's a lot more people in the world burning tokens using ChatGPT than there are who even know what Codex is.

It's a pretty smart move. If they weren't doing this, I would have simply switched back to DeepSeek, Mimo, GLM, etc. (and maybe K3) whenever I hit my usage limits, as was my normal custom.

> OpenAI obviously is doing it to gain mindshare but they're burning money before their IPO and can't sustain these resets.

We don’t know that. If they have already paid for the hardware and it is not running 100%, and customers would not pay to get reset, they don’t really lose money.

I think it's mostly to spread hype for the new models. Sol can be ridiculously long running, even without /goal so it can run for 12hr+ on a problem with defined and verifiable output. So it's a good way for people to get hyped about the capabilities without worrying about usage limits.

They also got a lot of goodwill by letting people use codex subscription in any harness they want, anywhere they want

I didn't knew about these resets up until a few days back... and every time they used to reset these limits, I thought I was going crazy... the usage numbers just didn't match. And the weekly end window just kept pushing ahead by a day or a few... just the right amount of deviation to make you believe you are going crazy.