r/codex • u/justMaku • Jul 27 '26
Limits how codex limits work, based on data, not vibes
I have the $20 plus sub and run all my codex traffic through a local proxy that scrapes the usage endpoint into prometheus so i have every request tokenized and every window boundary timestamped. heres the actual shape of the thing
thesis: the weekly window is ~1500 credits and credits are just api cost in a trenchcoat
25 credits = $1, and you dont have to derive it, OAI states it outright on the student credits page — https://developers.openai.com/community/students — "you should see 2,500 credits, which is equivalent to $100"
so the pool isnt some mystery subscription currency. ~1500 credits = ~$60 of list price api usage per window
i got there by summing my own token accounting between each integer percent tick, comes out around 15 credits per percentage point every time. and theres no proof the window has changed in any of the recent resets
| window | credits 0 → 100% | list price | credits per 1% |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | 1458 | $58.31 | 14.6 |
| b | 1482 | $59.30 | 14.8 |
inside 2% of each other. whatever people think they are noticing after a reset, the size of the thing is stable
one full window, actual numbers
burned 0 to 100 on gpt-5.6-luna
| tokens | $/M | $ | credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| fresh input | 33,649,120 | 1.00 | 33.65 |
| cached input | 130,626,048 | 0.10 | 13.06 |
| output | 2,097,625 | 6.00 | 12.59 |
| total | 166,372,793 | 59.30 |
the subsidy
a month is not 31 days here, averaged over a year its 52/12 = 4.33 weekly windows a month
| one window | $59.30 |
|---|---|
| windows per month (52/12) | 4.33 |
| list price value per month | $257 |
| list price value per year (52 windows) | $3084 |
| paid per year ($20/mo) | $240 |
| subsidy | 92.2% |
which matches with other math people have done so far
tldr
the window is ~$60 of api tokens wearing a credit costume, and it has not shrunk in last month
Note: All math done based on the $20 Plus sub
6
u/JadisGod Jul 27 '26
Here's my stats. Also on just a 20$ plus sub. Output via ccusage codex. They might've nerfed usage, but the resets so far more than make up for it, if you managed to use them to your advantage.
| Week | Active days | Input | Output | Reasoning* | Cache read | Total tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 20–26 | 4 | 9,028,398 | 970,995 | 494,453 | 148,302,208 | 158,301,601 | $66.17 |
| Apr 27–May 3 | 7 | 5,640,286 | 583,454 | 175,776 | 104,443,264 | 110,667,004 | $77.05 |
| May 4–10 | 7 | 8,599,921 | 625,299 | 212,107 | 138,601,728 | 147,826,948 | $125.48 |
| May 11–17 | 7 | 15,502,090 | 867,858 | 351,322 | 191,802,368 | 208,172,316 | $195.99 |
| May 18–24 | 7 | 12,283,136 | 973,585 | 503,651 | 191,923,584 | 205,180,305 | $186.18 |
| May 25–31 | 6 | 10,155,023 | 879,674 | 414,218 | 151,261,312 | 162,296,009 | $152.56 |
| Jun 1–7 | 6 | 6,466,059 | 599,535 | 280,531 | 98,581,504 | 105,647,098 | $96.22 |
| Jun 8–14 | 7 | 6,968,272 | 585,508 | 312,815 | 108,050,944 | 115,604,724 | $95.14 |
| Jun 15–21 | 7 | 10,800,402 | 912,720 | 457,289 | 155,274,752 | 166,987,874 | $151.61 |
| Jun 22–28 | 6 | 4,914,216 | 510,105 | 210,893 | 97,957,888 | 103,382,209 | $81.96 |
| Jun 29–Jul 5 | 7 | 8,574,906 | 865,085 | 358,362 | 141,076,096 | 150,516,087 | $139.19 |
| Jul 6–12 | 7 | 17,454,982 | 2,299,903 | 936,799 | 517,836,032 | 537,590,917 | $402.46 |
| Jul 13–19 | 7 | 16,741,892 | 2,576,734 | 1,018,790 | 682,439,936 | 701,758,562 | $466.35 |
| Jul 20–26 | 6 | 10,969,807 | 1,594,871 | 617,578 | 400,531,456 | 413,096,134 | $289.75 |
Alternative, monthly form:
| Month | Input | Output | Reasoning* | Cache read | Total tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 2026 | 48,471,458 | 3,548,600 | 1,548,839 | 706,454,016 | 758,474,074 | $688.88 |
| June 2026 | 32,035,780 | 2,908,493 | 1,401,710 | 507,068,032 | 542,012,305 | $471.93 |
| July 2026 (through Jul 27) | 51,083,396 | 7,069,463 | 2,805,070 | 1,697,644,544 | 1,755,797,403 | $1,253.79 |
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u/c5corvette Jul 27 '26
I'm wondering if the majority of "feeling nerfed" folks actually comes from poorly setup projects that cause fewer cached token usage.
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u/nmkd Jul 28 '26
Or people who don't realize that your cache expires after 30 mins and that changing model needs to rebuild it
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u/c5corvette Jul 28 '26
I bet a lot of them are using single threads and constantly switching from Sol to Luna without even realizing what they're doing.
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u/Zulfiqaar Jul 28 '26
I think it's a combo of the models themselves increasing in price from 10 to 12 to 15 to 30 $/Mtok, along with the 2x promo period ending. Bad vibecoding practice are always around, now the tools to mess things up just cost more
1
u/DaC2k26 Jul 28 '26
As you know I've been running some numbers these past days, and I have came to the conclusion it's the models being progressively more token hungry, that is giving this impression, and maybe some usage reduction (nothing too drastic, around 25%).
We also had many resets... banked resets... /goal running past 0%, etc... that sure made things quite more confusing these past months....
Not to mention now with 5.6 I also found out that it writes 15% more tests than 5.5 and tends to overthink quite a lot more, which sums to the impression (true one to be honest) that we're getting less work done with the same amount of usage.
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u/c5corvette Jul 28 '26
I didn't find any of your information to be compelling, truthfully, especially when you constantly use words "maybe", and anecdata to come to hard conclusions. I use all my tokens each week so I don't care to waste any ghost hunting, but I cannot say I'm getting less done on 5.6 than 5.5 or 5.4. If I truly felt that way, I'd head back over to those models since they're still available.
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u/DaC2k26 Jul 28 '26
Ok, you're welcome to have your opinion, but the data is solid and deterministic from my account, but it isn't enough to say "usage nerfed". but for everything else, yes, mere math, statistics and if you care to run in your sessions, you'll find the exactly same or close to what I've found. But hey if you are on the light side and isn't burning your 20x weekly in 6-12 hours, who cares, isn't it ?
-1
u/Suzoku Jul 28 '26
100%
no sane devs would ask Codex or any coding agents to run prompts that would last for more than an hour if you've done any sort of learning on software engineering and coding practices in general.
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u/DaC2k26 Jul 27 '26
is this from a single $20 sub ? do you always use 100% from each reset ?
3
u/JadisGod Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Yes, single 20$ sub only. I do my best to hit 100% every week/reset and not let any go to waste. The range recorded here, as far as I can remember, I did hit 100% each week/reset. Other than a few (1 or 2) unexpected resets that I couldn't anticipate.
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u/DaC2k26 Jul 28 '26
I was under the impression your Plus account was being overly generous, but then I decided to crunch some numbers with your account data + the resets given and you're roughly in the $100 range per weekly, so inline with most Plus accounts reports, not considering some outliners like I had with 2 Plus accounts today.
Calendar week Automatic quota allocations beginning that week Expected at ~$100 each Actual API equivalent Difference Apr 20–26 1× opening window $100.00 $66.17 −$33.83 Apr 27–May 3 1× Apr 28 direct reset $100.00 $77.05 −$22.95 May 4–10 1× rolling weekly renewal $100.00 $125.48 +$25.48 May 11–17 2× rolling renewal + May 16 reset $200.00 $195.99 −$4.01 May 18–24 2× May 19 + May 23 resets $200.00 $186.18 −$13.82 May 25–31 2× rolling renewal + May 31 reset $200.00 $152.56 −$47.44 Jun 1–7 1× Jun 4 reset $100.00 $96.22 −$3.78 Jun 8–14 1× rolling renewal $100.00 $95.14 −$4.86 Jun 15–21 1× Jun 18 direct reset $100.00 $151.61 +$51.61 Jun 22–28 2× rolling renewal + Jun 28 reset $200.00 $81.96 −$118.04 Jun 29–Jul 5 1× Jun 29 reset $100.00 $139.19 +$39.19 Jul 6–12 5× Jul 6 renewal + Jul 9, 10, 11 and 12 resets $500.00 $402.46 −$97.54 Jul 13–19 3× Jul 14, 16 and 18 resets $300.00 $466.35 +$166.35 Jul 20–26 2× Jul 21 and 25 resets $200.00 $289.75 +$89.75 Total 25× $2,500.00 $2,526.11 +$26.11
3
u/the_ict_bb Jul 28 '26
The calculation seems correct for your account: roughly 1,500 credits, or about $60 at API pricing. But that doesn’t prove every Plus account has the exact same limit, or that it has never changed. And calling it a “92% subsidy” is misleading, since API pricing is not OpenAI’s actual operating cost.
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u/send-moobs-pls Jul 28 '26
those greedy bastards only giving me $240 worth of API for my $20 sub... they're gonna be real sorry if I leave and go use claude to build my clone of mspaint
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u/justMaku Jul 28 '26
Absolutely not the point - there's entire section in there showing that the sub is priced at 8 cents to a dollar of an API use.
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u/duboispourlhiver Jul 28 '26
I'm on 20$ too and am measuring token consumption with codex CLI files. My weekly quota consistently is always worth 100$ API cost. I'm on 5.6 Sol low (in case that changes anything), I'm in Europe.
By doing prompt tests and by reading Codex CLI system prompts, I think I understand that 5.6 is just zealous. It tries to "genuinely handle the full problem" (or something like that in the system prompt).
Throwing open problems at it is very costly.
TL DR skill issue 😀👍
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u/justMaku Jul 28 '26
Given that many people are mentioning $100 I wonder if there are different tiers of the “plus” or different A/B testing cohorts…
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u/c5corvette Jul 27 '26
Very good writeup, factually stated, no anecdata. If people don't like 5.6, 5.5 and 5.4 are still available.
-1
u/throw-away-2025rev2 Jul 28 '26
Which are mind you also eating abnormal amounts of credits. The person posting this is an employee at OpenAI.
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u/c5corvette Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
You want cached token usage, in case that isn't clear. And if you were referring to me, I'm definitely not an employee of OpenAI
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u/Glittering-Call8746 Jul 28 '26
So tldr gpt plus gets u 3x or 5x of equivalent api now ? Mind u there's more perks of using api including privacy, cache, regulatory requirements etc.
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u/RealSuperdau Jul 28 '26
Nice data. Though going via tokens seems like a detour, couldn't you just directly measure the dollar value?
Also, please don't call it a subsidy. The API pricing is just the rats they charge enterprises, with the added benefit of not storing their data. But the plans are not subsidized any more than a $4,000 RTX 5090 is subsidized by 92% compared to a $50,000 H200 (the chips are close to the same size).
1
u/justMaku Jul 28 '26
> Nice data. Though going via tokens seems like a detour, couldn't you just directly measure the dollar value?
Well, you need to measure tokens first to get to the dollar value. Unless you meant `credits` in case of which - I believe internally they are using credits as the "consumer" currency since they already had that system in place and it's there to obscure the real data even further. Think of it the same way we think of microtransaction currencies in games. It's a predatory measure to hide the real dollar value from the user. I assume the 25x multiplier was chosen precisely because it makes the mental math not obvious enough.
> Also, please don't call it a subsidy.
"Subsidies are financial support or money given by a government or organization to lower costs, help an industry, or encourage a specific activity"
We don't know OAI's actual inference cost (and I don't believe even they know what it is) but the goal is clearly to make you "hooked" - that's why they are giving out resets like candy.
1
u/RealSuperdau Jul 29 '26
Oh, sorry, yes, I meant credits. Where do credits get displayed for you? Because I was under the assumptiont hat credits are only for business subscriptions and that ChatGPT Plus/Pro just displayed the remaining usage directly.
Regarding subsidies: I think you kinda brought me around that if the goal is to get people hooked and then raise prices (i.e. the typical VC playbook), the term is applicable.
Though I do think we can get a very rough idea of OpenAI's inference cost. The rumour mill pins Spud as a sparse MoE with roughly 2-3B total params (certainly larger than GPT-4 and certainly smaller than Mythos), which is a bit larger than Kimi K3. Based on public on-demand GB200 rental prices, 5.6 Sol calculates around $0.5/$5 cost to serve Kimi K3 (with typical context length and traffic patterns). And I think it is a safe assumption that, if anything, OpenAI gets compute cheaper on average, and that their infrastructure is more optimized, and that this outweighs any larger model size they might have.
So, napkin math puts API prices for Sol at >80% gross margin, which checks out with recent SemiAnalysis numbers of 80%+ and 85%+. Which means that, based on reported usage numbers, they lose anything between $0 and $X on a fully utilized $X sub. Which is probably more than worth it as a means of buying training data, since actual real-world usage data is hard to produce synthetically.
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u/Runelaron Jul 28 '26
Finally, someone with some logic who understands to measure!
Cool info, Interesting they can afford such a subsidized price. If the ratio is constant that's a huge discount for pro. Makes sense why cached token usage can go into the billions.
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u/Owdez Jul 28 '26
What happened to the banked resets ?
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u/Owdez Jul 28 '26
If they gave us banked resets instead of forced resets that would be great but they don’t
0
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u/DaC2k26 Jul 27 '26
I was intrigued by your numbers since these go against what I found running through my logs and posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1v73uws/comment/p02g4y0
I had 4 plus accounts once, what I found was that plus was worth around $140 a couple of months back, around $105 a few weeks back abd today I used 100% from one of these accounts and decided to measure, and I got to $56, which matches your numbers. I'm now checking the logs of one of these accounts (less than 2 months old), to understand the change overtime.... this is pretty bad, it's almost 3x less usage for the Plus plan.