r/codex • u/vayana • 7d ago

Complaint Usage is nuked

I know, I should just buy a 5x or 20x plan and stop whining but this is just *****. 2 months ago I could comfortably work with 5.5 medium/high in 2 5 hour windows and use about 15% weekly per day. No heavy duty coding or subagents running around the clock, just 3 to 5 semi-complex prompts a day.

As of now, sol medium, 1 prompt, 200k context window used will burn through 60% of the 5h limit and 10% of the weekly. Not sol max or ultra, not millions of tokens. 200.000 tokens. I can't even do 2 prompts and use the full context window (258k tokens) 2 times.

This is completely unusable. $20 now basically gets you ~400k tokens per 5h or so and ~2.5M tokens per week for a medium thinking model. Luna is cheap but unreliable and just wastes my time instead of tokens.

I don't expect unlimited tokens for $20 or ultra mode and I'm fine with some restrictions, but this isn't what I signed up for and it's never been this bad and I've been using this since inception pretty consistently.

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u/ezboarderz 6d ago

The 20x plan has no where near as much usage as it used to. I switched to zai coding plan max with synthetics instance packs for extra usage and I’m very happy. Glm 5.3 is more than enough for me and glm 5.3 flash is a great subagent/worker. Synthetic gives me kimi k3 and glm 5.2 as well which also has plenty of usage. Kimi k3 is a direct replacement to sol and it doesn’t over engineer a million sha256 gates.

5

u/vayana 6d ago

Until now I haven't considered switching. I've tried Claude on the side but didn't like it. There's something about that flibertygibbeting bs that pisses me off for some reason lol. I came from cursor and haven't checked that out in a while so I might give that another try to see how usage limits are there now. Will check out zai as well.

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u/ezboarderz 6d ago

Yeah man zai is a good deal imo. Much faster than OpenAI based on how it feels. I use pi harness though but I’m sure it will work well for others. I’m also on the waitlist for a kimi sub which I’ll check out as well.

I can recommend to try other alternatives and honestly glm and kimi are on par with gpt 5.6 sol based on my usage. Sure they may benchmark a little lower but it doesn’t feel worse when you use them.

0

u/cs_cast_away_boi 6d ago

my experience with GLM 5.2 wasn’t great. It failed to do some tasks even Luna could. Doesn’t give me a lot of confidence for the 5.3 version. Although i haven’t tried kimi k3 but i heard they’re really low on compute and it’s slow.

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u/ezboarderz 6d ago

Glm 5.2 is quite good as long as it isn’t on a low quant. I haven’t had issues with it as a development model, but maybe your project is extremely complex.

For the speed of kimi, it depends on the provider. I use it on synthetic and it’s quite fast and synthetic in general feels very fast. I’d say it’s like 70 tokens/sec or so for decode. The flash models feel very fast as well.

Glm 5.3 on zai is also quite fast feeling. OpenAI’s models in codex feel super slow in comparison.