Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message (help.openai.com)

172 points by ccmcarey 4 hours ago

PhilippGille 3 hours 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)

nba456_ 2 hours ago

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

camdenreslink 2 hours 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.

sixtyj 2 hours ago

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

raincole 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

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

raincole 2 hours ago

mrweasel 2 hours 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.

fauigerzigerk an hour 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

hmry 2 hours ago

Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature

toddmorey 2 hours 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.

OptionOfT 7 minutes ago

devmor an hour ago

SlinkyOnStairs an hour 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 an hour ago

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

predkambrij 18 minutes ago

Taximeter effect

LeafItAlone 2 hours 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?

Skunkleton 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 2 hours 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 an hour 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.

__mharrison__ 3 hours 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.

scosman 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

scosman 2 hours ago

mickeyp an hour 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.

aulin an hour ago

GH Copilot is still best deal, while it lasts

piyh 2 hours ago

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

cmrdporcupine an hour 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.

surajrmal 26 minutes ago

matt_heimer 2 hours 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.

spijdar 2 hours ago

purrcat259 2 hours 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.

verdverm 2 hours 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.

alifeinbinary 2 hours 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.

AstroBen 2 hours ago

verdverm 25 minutes ago

__mharrison__ 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

Rastonbury 3 hours 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 an hour 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?

fabian2k 2 hours 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 2 hours 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

m-hodges 3 hours ago

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

_fizz_buzz_ 2 hours 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.

vidarh 16 minutes ago

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

thegagne an hour ago

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

nojito 3 hours ago

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

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

Bombthecat 2 hours ago

Management demands it

LtWorf 3 hours ago

Good!

thejazzman 3 hours 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

SoftTalker 2 hours ago

JesseTG 3 hours ago

nearbuy 2 hours ago

bloppe 2 hours ago

SecretDreams 3 hours ago

GaggiX 3 hours ago

butterlettuce 2 hours ago

It’s Joever.

UltraSane 3 hours ago

subsidies always lead to waste.

adamtaylor_13 3 hours 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.

supliminal 2 hours 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.

BoggleOhYeah 3 minutes ago

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

SlinkyOnStairs 2 hours 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 an hour 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!

cududa 2 hours ago

That guy has his own form of AI psychosis

hn_throwaway_99 2 hours 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.

lelanthran 24 minutes 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.

cyanydeez 2 hours 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.

aurareturn 10 minutes ago

operatingthetan an hour ago

redml an hour 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 43 minutes 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 29 minutes 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?

AstroBen 2 hours ago

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

rvnx 2 hours 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.

mike_hearn an hour 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.

AstroBen 2 hours ago

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

squigglingAvia an hour 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?

supliminal 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

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

aledalgrande an hour 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 4 minutes ago

type4 42 minutes ago

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

alkonaut 2 hours ago

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

convexly 2 hours 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.

anuramat 2 hours 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.

felixbraun an hour ago

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

adi_kurian 2 hours ago

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

rchaud an hour ago

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

OutOfHere 42 minutes 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.

jamesu 2 hours 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.

flufluflufluffy 2 hours ago

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

kvanbeek 2 hours ago

So migrate to gemini now?

matt_heimer 2 hours 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.

DeathArrow an hour ago

Well, Alibaba, Z.ai and MiniMax have quite generous coding plans. And their models are not far from OpenAI's and Anthropic's.

SilverElfin 3 hours 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 3 hours 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...

gigatexal 2 hours ago

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

sdevonoes 2 hours ago

I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later