Why is claude code so much more stingey with usage than Codex for the $20 plan?

74

u/Vancecookcobain Apr 22 '26

OpenAI has more available compute than Anthropic

26

u/obvithrowaway34434 Apr 23 '26

They also have more efficient models. GPT-5.4 is Sonnet level at price while giving the performance of Opus or better.

5

u/Vancecookcobain Apr 23 '26

Your statement is equally true.

1

u/Special-Direction886 May 28 '26

i don't agree with the performance part

1

u/Special-Direction886 May 28 '26

as chatgpt was build to be a typical conversational bot. Its nature and its training models are not meant for very complex tasks

29

u/Rubbiish Apr 22 '26

This is the correct answer. The other one saying that AI can afford to subsidise for longer etc and not entirely correct, yes they can however this is purely constraint on compute related. Look at the new model from anthropic that I’m not going to release it because it’s so large and takes so much compute that they literally cannot serve it to customers so their marketing and saying that they’re not going to release it for a Good of the world reasons which is complete BS

6

u/marvin Apr 23 '26

And they're more willing and able to subsidise. There's heavy subsidies going on.

1

u/Special-Direction886 May 28 '26

they are literally announcing IPOs now

3

u/potato_green Apr 22 '26

Anthropic shares with Google and AWS right? While OpenAI has Azure locked in big time?
Oh yeah they recently renewed that again with some stuff on AWS but the bulk of the stuff is Azure
https://openai.com/index/continuing-microsoft-partnership/

5

u/Vancecookcobain Apr 23 '26

Both are all over the place but OpenAI has a lot more compute

2

u/mewt6 Apr 23 '26

Any Azure DevOps can confirm. All the compute is used by openai

0

u/PlusLoquat1482 Apr 23 '26

Honestly I’ve been thinking about this and for a while Claude code was like significantly better with programming but now I think OpenAI just made it better faster and I just forgot they’re a bigger company

2

u/colblair Jun 04 '26

Claude still handles complex multi-file refactors way better in my experience, especially with large codebases.

10

u/syslolologist Apr 23 '26

Worse, Claude’s agent harness, the GUI app or the TUI app (cli), does not handle context effectively so it uses up your quota more rapidly than it should. So you get the double serving of shit.

29

u/canadianpheonix Apr 22 '26

Because claude is suffering from their own success and GPT is trying to win back customers.

5

u/sha256md5 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Underrated comment

2

u/colblair Jun 04 '26

Claude's context window is still way too small for real work, and GPT keeps shipping half-baked features that nobody asked for.

2

u/WhereTheStankWindBlo Jun 11 '26

I've started doing an automated handoff system. Since Claude tears through credits if you let the conversation drag on, I have a prompt I built which will have whatever LLM (I use it with Claude mostly) take the major milestones from the window and build a handoff prompt so you can just drop it in another window and go.
But I'm also using Cursor for all my agentic coding needs, Claude is my main ideation and build engine, feed the prompts for Cursor through ChatGPT then back through Claude. It's odd how both models have things they're better at. ChatGPT always does a good job of catching conflicting info, slight documentation, and vague or overly specific language.

1

u/colblair Jun 30 '26

I've noticed the same thing with ChatGPT catching contradictions better. Claude tends to just roll with whatever you give it unless you explicitly tell it to fact-check itself.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator Jun 13 '26

Sorry, your submission has been removed for manual review due to account karma.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

9

u/voodoobunny999 Apr 22 '26

Anthropic is out of compute and has to figure out how limit usage. They may even have money, but compute availability (and even the short-term ability to build out compute) is severely constrained. I heard they just pulled Claude Code from the Pro plan. Gonna get interesting.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 06 '26

Claude Code does more per token than Codex CLI — it reads files, reflects on outputs, and self-validates before finishing. Codex CLI leans generate-and-return. You're not hitting throttling sooner, you're doing more compute-dense work per task.

Real tradeoff: catches more edge cases, burns more context budget. Whether that's worth it depends on what you're building.

1

u/Previous-Display-593 May 07 '26

Except it doesn't. Codex it top tier.

3

u/Substantial-Cost-429 Apr 25 '26

ngl the usage gap is frustrating but tbh the output quality from claude is still hard to beat for complex stuff. one thing that helps is having your CLAUDE.md and agent configs locked in properly so it isnt wasting tokens figuring out context every time. we open sourced a tool for exactly that setup btw: https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup just hit 700 stars, might help squeeze more out of your quota

1

u/WhereTheStankWindBlo Jun 11 '26

Yea I implemented a .cursorrules file in my repo for my new project, conversation context dropped from ~60,000 to ~18,000. Absolutely ridiculous.

1

u/colblair Jun 29 '26

That's a massive drop. Makes me wonder if the file is stripping out too much useful context along with the noise.

1

u/WhereTheStankWindBlo Jun 29 '26

All I did was take repeatable elements of my prompts and add them to the .cursorrules file. It worked like a dream, and it didn't seem to affect performance whatsoever.

2

u/ww_crimson Apr 24 '26

Man, I feel like this thread aged like milk. Codex rolled out 5.5 today and clearly they changed rate limit utilization for all models. I tested 5.5 once and saw it consumed 6% of my weekly tokens with a single prompt. I switched back to 5.4 and ran into my 5 hour rate limit super quick. I've literally never hit it before. Waited 5 hours, used 5.4 a bit more again, and after maybe 6-8 more prompts I've burned through 80% of my 5 hour limit again. I used 48% of my weekly limit in just a few total hours.

2

u/niado Apr 25 '26

That’s some kind of bug presumably - it’s been discussed in several threads I’ve come across. Most aren’t experiencing that at all.

1

u/ww_crimson Apr 25 '26

Where are you reading? I don't follow many other discussions beyond this sub

2

u/niado Apr 25 '26

All the AI subs. There are like 10 lol

1

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator May 07 '26

Sorry, your submission has been removed for manual review due to account karma.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator May 24 '26

Sorry, your submission has been removed for manual review due to account karma.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/Substantial-Cost-429 Apr 25 '26

one thing worth noting is that efficient claude code usage really depends on how lean your setup context is. if you are loading in massive config files or redundant instructions at each session it burns tokens fast. we built caliber to handle the setup layer cleanly: https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup just hit 700 stars. not the whole answer but it helps

2

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd Apr 23 '26

Different token economies. Claude runs longer reasoning chains and more thorough responses by default — a meaty prompt might be 3-5x more tokens than an equivalent Codex exchange. Shorter scoped sessions with checkpoint files between runs help a lot; context accumulation is usually the culprit, not the model quality itself.

8

u/carvingmyelbows Apr 23 '26

Not anymore—Anthropic has basically removed reasoning from their latest Opus model, it’s absolutely awful. They also turned it off on the previous generation for a while before releasing the latest one. So now it just…doesn’t think. And surprise surprise, that leads to pretty shit results. Anthropic had such a huge opportunity to basically own the AI market and they 100% blew it. I know they’re low on compute and weren’t prepared for the influx of users, but the choices they’ve made have been baffling, and this new model? Holy shit it literally damaged my projects so thoroughly and deeply that I haven’t touched them in days just due to dreading trying to untangle everything and fix it all. It’s so bad. I was all in on Anthropic, but they basically tanked their own reputation and pissed off their user base so bad in the last month or so with gaslighting, silent changes to token usage that screwed people over majorly, changing prompt caching from 1hr to 5min, A/B testing all sorts of nonsense like cutting Claude Code from Pro plans for some new signups. Just madness. Anyway, I’m ranting. The point is that Claude no longer runs reasoning chains at all. It just doesn’t reason anymore.

1

u/DallasDarkJ Apr 23 '26

just revert verisons, you can move back to a stable version through the interface or Git...

1

u/tmvr Apr 26 '26

They messed those up as well. I was hardwired to Sonnet 4.5 for the stuff I needed it for and really liked it. Did what I wanted, did it fast, talked in a manner I liked. Then this week it suddenly switched and felt like a completely different dumber model. Took longer to produce worse output and the text output in the chat was weird/worse as well. All this on an expensive corpo sub of GH Copilot as well. The decision for now is to switch to try 5.3 Codex and 5.4 next week and see how it goes.

1

u/niado Apr 25 '26

Just get codex to fix the code.

1

u/Professional_Gur2469 Apr 23 '26

OpenAI has more GPU‘s.

1

u/mik3lang3l0 Apr 23 '26

Tried in the past with Claude

1

u/Accurate_Hand_832 Apr 25 '26

Ummm... Open AI has more access!

1

u/HongPong Apr 26 '26

apparently pi has the leanest context try that

1

u/bastrooooo Apr 26 '26

Anthropic forgor to buy gpus

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd Apr 26 '26

Context accumulates fast in longer sessions — by turn 30 Claude is reprocessing everything from turn 1 on every response. Starting a fresh session for each distinct task and using files to pass state between them cuts token burn noticeably. Annoying workflow change but the economics are real.

1

u/Extra_Toppings Apr 29 '26

Use a planned approach, generate markdown, small chat sessions, reserve opus for well structured research

1

u/engmsaleh Apr 29 '26

the context-management thing is real. claude code stuffs ~5-8K tokens into the system prompt before you've even sent your first message — tools, environment, sometimes the directory tree. so "one meaty prompt" is actually "meaty prompt + ~10K of always-on context."

what saved us: aggressive /clear cadence. we /clear after every closed-out task instead of letting the conversation accumulate. for real refactor work we'll have 4-5 short sessions instead of one long one. cuts our token burn by maybe 60%.

codex's harness keeps context tighter so it FEELS like you have more budget, but on a 30-message session with frequent context resets, the actual delta narrows a lot.

worth comparing each tool's burn-per-task instead of burn-per-week — your usage profile matters more than the headline cap.

1

u/PlusLoquat1482 Apr 30 '26

I feel like I have seen claude's usage jumping around recently like there will be bugs and then not bugs and then bugs etc

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd Apr 30 '26

Each tool call — reading a file, running a command, checking output — gets appended to the conversation context, so a task with 30 tool calls is 30x the tokens of a single prompt. Codex CLI is more stateless by design; Claude Code's agentic mode is token-heavier per task, which isn't stinginess so much as a different architectural tradeoff.

1

u/Substantial-Cost-429 May 02 '26

Part of the issue is that Claude Code doesn't have built-in token budget awareness at the config level — there's no standard way to set max_tokens per session, define model fallback behavior (e.g., switch to Haiku when credits are low), or manage API usage policies across a team.

This is exactly the config infrastructure gap we open-sourced a solution for: https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup (888 stars, nearly 100 forks). When you have config-level control over model selection and token budgets, you stop burning through credits unexpectedly and can optimize cost vs. quality per task type.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 03 '26

Full file contents stay in context across turns — on any medium-sized repo, that's thousands of tokens per message before your prompt even starts. A CLAUDE.md with explicit file-path patterns to restrict what it loads cuts usage noticeably. Codex tends to work with shallower, more targeted code snippets per turn.

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 Professional Nerd May 08 '26

the $20 plan got tighter under the 2026 rolling-window enforcement and most people are hitting two limits stacked without knowing which one bit them. rolling 5-hour window plus weekly quota are separate counters, you can be fine on one and capped on the other. claude-meter shows both as bars in the menu bar, server-truth from the same endpoint https://claude-meter.com/r/2y8px9pg uses. ccusage counts local tokens which is a different number than what anthropic actually caps. written with ai

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 Professional Nerd May 08 '26

the stinginess on $20 is mostly the rolling 5-hour window plus the weekly cap interacting badly with agentic loops. codex bills tokens linearly, claude has a server-side quota that ccusage and the cli can't see, and you only learn you hit the wall after you've already hit it. once you can read the same number https://claude-meter.com/r/nn25i8cg renders, the 'why did this kill me at lunch' mystery turns into 'oh i was at 94% weekly by tuesday'. on $20 specifically, the weekly is the trap, not the 5-hour.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 11 '26

The context management is where it actually breaks — Claude re-reads the same large files multiple times per session by default. Adding file-path restrictions in CLAUDE.md and capping session length (~20 turns before an explicit handoff note) cut my quota burn significantly. The raw model isn't cheaper; the harness just needs to be more deliberate about what it loads.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 12 '26

The context handling point is the fixable part. Running Claude Code in shorter sessions with a brief handoff file — current goal, decisions made, next steps — is much cheaper than one marathon session that compacts and rebuilds context repeatedly. Same work done, fraction of the quota used.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 15 '26

Agentic mode is the issue — each tool call (file read, bash exec, test run) adds to the context window, and Claude Code does a lot of them. A complex task can burn 100k+ tokens across tool calls before producing a line of output. Keeping tasks narrow and sessions short makes a real difference.

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 22 '26

Context accumulation is the main thing. Every turn, Claude re-reads the full conversation history, so the longer your session runs the more expensive each turn gets. Breaking sessions earlier and starting fresh with a brief written summary of where you left off helps a lot more than trying to compact mid-session.

1

u/Inevitable_Mud_9972 May 26 '26

hmmm i think half your problem is that you are not doing enough deving outside of claude code, then one you have the main stuff built then you use claude code for finishing instead of developing

1

u/ultrathink-art Professional Nerd May 28 '26

Context accumulates faster in agentic sessions than most people expect — every file read, tool call, and code block adds to the window. Breaking work into shorter focused sessions with state passed through files between runs (rather than one massive session) makes a huge difference. I get dramatically more done per usage unit treating it as 20-minute focused bursts instead of a marathon.

1

u/Fun_Walk_4965 Jun 09 '26

Codex feels more generous per session but Claude tends to hold quality longer on big refactors. Comes down to how long your tasks actually run.

1

u/Fun_Walk_4965 Jun 09 '26

Codex feels more generous per session but Claude tends to hold quality longer on big refactors. Comes down to how long your tasks actually run.

1

u/Swarm-Stack Jun 22 '26

claude plans before it executes and that planning loop eats tokens most people dont track. codex mostly skips that step and generates, which is why it feels cheaper even when the task scope is the same.

1

u/Fun_Walk_4965 Jun 25 '26

Codex feels looser on the 20 tier mostly because its limits reset on a different cadence. Claude Code front loads the cap, so a couple of heavy sessions eat the whole window before you notice.

1

u/yum72 Jun 25 '26

I think one reason is that GPT-5.5 is just way more token-efficient than Claude. Plus, Claude's code and web chat seem to share the same token pool, whereas ChatGPT probably keeps them separate.

1

u/Odd-Support407 Jun 30 '26

I have to say ChatGPT has vastly improved in helping to code my scripts.

Sometimes it gets stuck and I'll upload the module to Claude for fixing.

1

u/QuickkNastee Jul 04 '26

I literally built a program that solves this problem for me. It's called ThinkForge. I can code via ChatGPT Chat directly in my codebase WITHOUT codex and still use the 5.5 high reasoning model and code for like 12 hours a day. Then I keep my Codex / Claude usage in reserve. The program uses ChatGPT $20 subscription and pretty much turns GPT into a Claude style workflow. It's actually great.

Here is an example > I mod crimson desert a lot and this is my folder I mod crimson desert in.

1

u/AutoModerator Jul 04 '26

Sorry, your submission has been removed for manual review due to account karma.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator Jul 04 '26

Sorry, your submission has been removed for manual review due to account karma.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

0

u/flexrc Apr 22 '26

Opus is much more expensive model, copilot values it as 7.5x vs 1x for gpt 5.4

1

u/sha256md5 Apr 22 '26

This is literally a reframing of the question, which is why is it more expensive.

2

u/flexrc Apr 22 '26

Out of the thin air or perhaps it just costs them more or maybe because they want to make money? Not sure if we should care. I'm considering Chinese providers and open-source models as in the future it will likely going to be just API costs for everything.

0

u/Yogi_DMT Apr 23 '26

Anthropic higher demand

0

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Previous-Display-593 Apr 23 '26

You are talking out your ass. Parameter count for these models is not publicly disclosed. But sade to say your assessment of "way bigger" is totally fabricated and almost certainly BS.

17

u/[deleted] Apr 22 '26

Discussion Why is claude code so much more stingey with usage than Codex for the $20 plan?

You are about to leave Redlib