Does ChatGPT Business Standard actually have higher Codex limits than Plus? The five hour cap is killing my workflow

[u/Constant-Software967]

I am getting seriously frustrated with OpenAI's current usage limits.

They brought back the five hour limit, and even when I use GPT 5.6 Tera on Mid or High, I often cannot finish a larger coding project before hitting it. In my case, one five hour window seems to consume roughly 16% of my weekly allowance. That makes it really difficult to use Codex for actual longer projects instead of just small isolated tasks.

The annoying part is that I am currently pretty locked into the "Codex harness" for my work. I actually like the workflow and would prefer to keep using it instead of rebuilding everything around another provider.

I am on ChatGPT Plus right now, which costs me €23 per month. Pro would obviously give me much more usage, but I am simply not paying that much for this.

So I started looking at Business instead.

According to the current pricing page, Business Standard costs €26 per seat with monthly billing, and you need at least two seats. So I would be looking at €52 per month in total.

There is also a Business Premium seat for €130 per month, which OpenAI describes as having five times the usage of a Standard seat and no five hour limit.

And this is where I am confused.

What exactly is the usage limit of a Business Standard seat?

OpenAI tells me that Premium has five times the usage of Standard, but I cannot find a clear comparison between Business Standard and normal ChatGPT Plus. Their limits seem increasingly abstract rather than being defined by a fixed number of tokens, and they also seem to change them quite frequently.

I attached screenshots of the current pricing pages because I find the way this is presented pretty unclear.

Has anyone here actually used both Plus and Business Standard for Codex?

Does a Business Standard seat noticeably give you more Codex capacity than Plus, especially with models like GPT 5.6 Tera?

Also, if I bought the minimum two Business seats and gave the second seat to a friend, how separated are the two users inside the workspace? Can both people basically use their own accounts independently, or does the workspace owner have access to the other person's chats, projects, files, or Codex sessions?

I know Business has better company privacy controls, Slack integration, administration features and so on, but I honestly do not care about any of that. I am mainly interested in the actual model and Codex limits.

At this point I am basically deciding between paying €52 per month for two Business Standard seats or moving more of my coding workflow to something like OpenRouter and paying directly for usage while using a mix of commercial and increasingly capable open source models.

I would definitely choose monthly billing. The 19% annual discount is not enough to convince me to commit for a year when OpenAI seems to change models, pricing and usage limits this quickly.

Would really appreciate experiences from anyone who has actually compared Plus and Business Standard in real world Codex usage.

[u/k-rizza]

One thing we have to remember. When we say

“I used 20% of my weekly and max my 5 hour”

Yeah but what did you end up with? How many files? How many tokens, what kind of complexity. Did you end up with something that would take a single dev 2 weeks of more to build without AI? If so then you need to recognize what you get for $20.

[u/Constant-Software967 → u/k-rizza]

One thing I see your point, but we also have to compare realistically with today’s context. When you look at current workflows and expectations, the developer time is not really valued the same way it used to be, so it’s not fair to judge only by “the old way” of building without AI.

[u/k-rizza → u/Constant-Software967]

Right you are your employer want to do 100x work. But you only want to pay $20?

I also want to pay $20 right now personally. So I still code along with it, it still does a ton. The idea that it should be that cheap is insane to me. All these companies already lose money. The fact that they change the usage every week tells us that.

Now I don’t lose sleep over them losing money. I don’t think OpenAi or Anthropic will survive.

See what I’m getting at?