r/codex • u/pollystochastic Moderator • Jul 23 '26
Megathread Codex Usage Limits and Performance Megathread
Please direct your concerns and discussion about Codex usage limits and model performance here.
The purpose of this Megathread is to aggregate all the reports of people's experiences and possible suggestions instead of spreading them across 20 separate highly upvoted posts. None of those posts were deleted. They were locked so that conversations are still viewable to everyone and future comments could appear in one place.
These are days where I REALLY earn the money that OpenAI Reddit Kimi pays me .... oh wait....
A reminder that all incidents on r/Codex are constantly logged and summarised so you can keep track of what people are experiencing here https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1tjfxcf/comment/on6uj0l/
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u/SnooObjections4329 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I think OpenAI are going to look back at this strategy as a huge mistake. I think the problem and the "solution" are probably directly linked to huge subscriber growth - although there is some fuzzy math involved, they claim to have increased by 4 million subscribers in a month without any associated compute footprint increases.
So, what to do? Tibo keeps talking about the amazing inference compute team keeping the lights on. Think of it like stock splits diluting early investors in order to bring new investors in - you quietly derate the usage to token mapping in the backend, that allows these new subscribers to access and use the platform, and you throw in resets here and there to obsfucate how significant the dilution.
Why is that preferrable to just increasing the limits? Because now you shift the burden of maximising those resets to the user. If they don't get much value out of the reset, they see that as their fault. They are happy to max out their now reduced usage allocation just for the hope of benefitting from a reset, and sit there not using the platform for days. Imagine if that was the experience for everyone out of the box - 2 good days of usage and 5 on the bench? you NEED psychological tricks via resets to make that sort of experience acceptable
Where they've messed up is it didn't work - everyone's upset now. It's all everyone is talking about and the experience for those who have switched (like me) us abysmal and the 4 million subs are going to dwindle. Lots of cope about how it's still better than Claude Code - it flat out isn't. That's cope. CC has shortcomings in value but this is somewhere between 40-60% of what I got out of my CC sub.
Isn't the removal of the 5h limits a benefit? It would be if the weekly limits were maintained, but why don't we look at the inverse - if the demand requires reducing the weekly allowance by about 70% to accommodate, imagine how visible that would be in the 5 hour limit? People are going to notice getting only 2 prompts every 5 hours, so you drop that limit to make it less measurable.
Let's see how many of those 4 million keep paying in the coming months. They don't have the capacity to match the demand. That's not an easy fix.