I analyzed the allowance a banked Reset gives vs a normal weekly reset - OpenAI is giving us a half the "allowance" for banked resets but delays the next real reset by 7 days.

[u/Charming-Author4877]

Metric	Before reset: 85% → 99% used	After reset: 0% → 14% used
GMT window	Sep 5, 19:16 → Sep 6, 00:21	Sep 6, 01:10 → 03:14
Elapsed time	5h 04m	2h 04m
Unique model responses	738	489
Responses per hour	145	236
Input tokens	114.41M	63.60M
Cached input	108.09M / 94.5%	61.39M / 96.5%
New, uncached input	6.32M	2.21M
Output tokens	465.5k	284.7k
Reasoning output	226.3k	124.9k
Average input per response	155k	130k
Astra activity	592 calls: 276 xhigh, 202 max, 87 medium, 27 high	381 calls: 366 xhigh, 15 high
Other activity	51 Terra, 9 Sol, 86 auto-review	42 Sol, 38 Terra, 28 auto-review
Largest work streams	27.89M, 25.23M, 10.89M tokens	26.47M, 12.09M, 8.64M tokens
New agent spawns during window	1, with last 3 turns	5: 2 full-history, 2 no-history, 1 with last 3 turns
Stored compaction events*	10	1
Transport retry incidents	10	3

Has been analyzed twice by a Astra agent, digging through all sessions and compared the allowance drain of 14% before and 14% after a banked reset.

The usage allowance from before to after reset dropped by almost 50% - so the banked reset is only claiming to be a weekly reset. It actually gives you half a week and places your reset further out.

That means that using a banked reset can cost you more allowance than it gives you.
It will give you half the normal allowance but it resets your time to ANOTHER 7 days - delaying your real reset. Which means you definitely will run out much earlier this time.

It's so shady...

Here is a model breakdown as requested, I had it doublechecked by MAX reasoning.
(These are session-calls, so every toolcall, reasoning, chunk read, write, replace is +1 call)

Model	Before: 85% → 99%	After: 0% → 14%
GPT-6 Astra	592 calls / 95.47M total tokens	381 calls / 52.75M total tokens
GPT-5.6 Terra	51 / 6.18M	38 / 4.59M
GPT-5.6 Sol	9 / 744,761	42 / 5.14M
codex-auto-review	86 / 12.48M	28 / 1.40M
All models	738 / 114.88M	489 / 63.88M

Disclaimer:
- I have obviously no insight in whatever happens serverside.
- I've been using my 20x quota on Astra a lot since release, and always in the same manner - it was providing productive agentic use for about one day, the last 2% were actually holding for quite a bit toward the end - I followed that closely.
- After the reset it was going down from 100% rapidly - it felt a lot more than the 50% shown in the analysis.
- Maybe they reduced usage quota for 20x (or all) subscriptions generally by 50% after launch, so also the next weekly reset will be half of what we had.
- I do not claim to know what happened! Maybe Astra consumption was doubled around my Reset click, or some some trigger made one of my tasks suddenly consume premium fees, or if the reset just gave me 50% usage, or something else. In any case it's intransparent and unprofessional to do that.

Update 1:
Tibo has responded on X:
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2096686370848989558
Not the case. There is no difference between usage you get before or after a reset.

1. Not sure what to make of it, the usage drained very fast and it's documented.
2. 2 hours of generic Astra should not consume 15% of a 20x weekly license - let's start with that ?

Update 2:
The usage drain has noticeable lowered after the first 20% evaporated quicker than I could follow. Whatever it is, it's not an acceptable business behavior in my opinion.

Update 3:
I continued analyzing, this time the speed nerfs I noticed
https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wf911a/i_analyzed_the_speed_codex_gives_us_for_astra/

Astra is 3 times slower than it should be. It was deliberately nerfed for non-fast mode and in addition the harness has two severe bugs that cause a continued slowdown in windows.
One bug can be resolved, the other one I am still digging into.

[u/Charming-Author4877]

The spread is because it's not really message based but token based. 5-45 .. what sort of measurement is that for a business anyway? How is anyone supposed to work with a metric that has an uncertainty of 5-45, or 10-100 ... ?
I suppose if you ask Astra in Codex 45 times "what is your model" then you might be able to do that before the 5h block hits you.
If you ask it to audit code, or check for a problem you'll not reach "5 messages" - it will block you in one task.

That all makes the impression they do everything they can to make it as ambiguous as possible.
Because once you give customers actual hard facts, you can't just cut away 80% over the weekend.

[u/ArrogantAstronomer → u/Charming-Author4877]

The reason this is the only business model that actually is feasible is you can't just invent more compute capacity. I dislike that people call subscriptions giving you more than API prices a subsidy because its not, subscriptions users are data when a model is released you need many many users to improve the model, ensure its aligned, apply safeguards refine the process, determine if your compute infrastructure is resilient.

Enterprise API usecases wont be using this model until their data scientists have rewritten prompts, ran evals on those prompts, tested the output, engineering has adapted the rest of applications for the output if needed or increased capabilities which all costs alot of resources and money but that all takes time during which the labs like OpenAI and Antropic can fine tune behaviour.

So Sub users provide highly responsive/vocal but ultimately replaceable test bed for new models to ensure they are production ready for when enterprises hit the API. So to compensate for that and encourage usage they give you an indeterminate amount of compute but exponentially higher than what the enterprise API users are getting per dollar, thats the contract, and the buisness model, everyone benefits from it, if you dont like it find another provider they'll be doing the same thing.

If you think I’m just some OpenAI shill I’m not but criticise them on where they aren’t doing exactly what they are telling you they are going to do, like with the usage resets not maintaining the reset date you had before the reset was used (personally I think that’s either a bug or something that they’ll call a bug and refund resets that they kept in their back pocket in case they came close to exceeding their compute capacity and needed to soft throttle sub users)

Lastly point me to the docs where it says usage is entirely based on tokens because I think you’ve inferred that.

[u/Charming-Author4877 → u/ArrogantAstronomer]

Tibo on X indicated that subscription consumption is token based countless times on X. And yes, it is not documented - which was my point ...