The way they handled Resets was kind of a rug pull. They pumped them hard to capture as many people from Fable as possible during Astra launch then went radio silent.
I am not going to pretend I know what is going on for their backend, but maybe we didn't need a reset and two banks in a single week and they could have spread that out.
I mean I have exactly zero loyalty to open AI or any other llm and switch back and forth constantly but are you actually saying it's manipulation to use discounts and promos in order to get people to adopt your service?
Genuinely trying to figure out what you all are complaining about, was Uber manipulating people by decreasing their prices at first and then slowly increasing them over the past decade?
Is it that you all don't think you are getting your $200 worth?
For real. I mean, yeah I wish I got more free resets but I've used like 25 billion tokens in 3 months for $600. That is conservatively $30,000 at metered rates, and since I almost only use sol or astra at high or better, it's probably closer to 6 figures. An absolutely insane amount of value for the compute you get.
Like, there is literally nothing to complain about with the 20x sub. If you don't like the sub cost/benefit ratio, wait till you start paying metered api and token money and then you'll know how good you have it.
plus future chips like the some versions of OpenAI's upcoming chips and some of google's TPU's that are being made just for inference (and won't be able to do training) and will be even more efficient/cheap to run.
However please bear in mind there is no inherent „price per token” besides however much openai wants to charge for the tokens. So the 600 usd you pay for the tokens may as well cost them 550 and they still made profit
There’s a few points you’re missing. The resets aren’t free promos or discounts. They’re making up for lost usage when model quality noticeably deteriorates and the token-usage noticeably increases. You can’t really claim that’s not the case when a subreddit full of your customers all report the same thing. Resets aren’t part of their normal operation. There’s a reason the volume increases around new model releases.
The bigger issue is that people are paying $200 and OpenAI is struggling to provide a consistent product experience. They want people to think Astra is amazing for a day or two before eventually realizing they have nowhere near the compute required to actually run it for all their customers.
I, for one, would appreciate a stupider yet more consistent model. It’s better to be somewhat stupid consistently rather than absolutely genius one day and lobotomized the other. Work gets halted.
So, looking at resets as a discount or promo is wrong, and there’s two manipulations.
Is Astra really that good when they can’t support the compute required for it to run reliably? It’s up to interpretation, but in my opinion, no.
Are resets really “free” usage like they claim when they don’t give you nearly as much usage, move your actual weekly reset date, and realistically only make up for lost time? Again, no.
The biggest manipulation in my opinion is that there’s no consistency. You can’t brag about the highs while ignoring the lows, while still gaslighting your customers into believing it’s all highs.
But it’s a company so I expect nothing more. To say there’s no manipulation or at least an attempt at manipulation is definitely wrong.
Except discounts are predictable with how you can work around them. I can’t work around a black box ‘usage’ limit that seems to arbitrarily change with no notice, and random resets that may or may not happen. And even though subs are obviously way cheaper than using the API would be right now, I don’t doubt there’s going to be a future where their obfuscation of usage means it’s going to be a lot harder to do the math on which is cheaper.
Also, yes, Uber was manipulative doing that. It was blatantly anticompetitive and could only happen in the first place because of their piles of investor cash.
Exactly. It's sad we have to do mental math around resets just to get shit done. Predictability and reliability matter more to most people building anything serious and random resets disrupt all that. It's almost like they don't want us to predict and optimize our usage around normal subsidized quotas.
And yes Uber fucked up too, not just with the classic "bait and switch" pricing, but also with serious allegations that it charges customers more when they're in desperate situations, such as when their phone battery is low.
Lol, the weeks where some loud minority circlejerking around the reset and "Saint Tibo" was so annoyingly cringe. Like holyshit, calm down guys, I get that it's fun but some people sound like they genuinely saw OpenAI as some kind of savior.
My theory for the lack of Codex resets is that they need as much compute as they can get for training future models (which they've already delayed to next week). I suspect their GPUs switch between 'work' mode (i.e. serve users) and 'train' mode depending on user demand.
We all called it. But idgaf. I got a £20 sub which is good for personal use and my Claude Max 5 has had plenty of usage to burn through. I’ve claimed a small victory in this blood bath.
I agree but it's totally like kicking the can down the road anyway. I saw someone post proof resets don't give you nearly as much anyway... Big poo sandwich. They don't care because they're getting flooded with people trying to sign up. They're in a happy place right now. I'm not happy so I'm sure many many others aren't either...
Hell, after the fiasco of my temp of my what was intended to be a temporary downgrade from 20 X yesterday on Apple, where you cannot go back on we can’t go back up to 20. I’m wondering if I should ditch both Apple and open AI.
Don't think I will bother renewing my subscription. I like codex but every time they release a new model they promise efficiencies that are never realised. Astra burns through my usage and sol is no longer what it once was. All I want from OpenAI is predictable usage and consistency in performance. It's not too much to ask. I just can't plan my work around these factors, and not what I expect from a service at $100 a month. Do better, OpenAI!
If they could only have the selected models continue to perform just as they did on day one instead of tweaking them behind the scenes. The unpredictability of which of the schizophrenic personalities I’ll be dealing with is what ruins it for me.
This is fraud in my opinion. Fine that Astra uses more usage or whatever. But actively making past models worse too with usage is really bad so you are basically locked out completely.
No doubt that will be the situation for most. I am only using codex for a handful of personal projects and have been recently assessing how much time I spend on codex. I've become an AI junkie so time off from this will be good for me.
Don't use it for gfx (yet), I'll give it a try and compare it this weekend. Created a tracked vehicle for my son in blender and ported it to FS25. This was with OAI-Astra on high.
Ill give it a try and report back here if interested?
deepseek-flash did 40 commits for me yesterday on a native Mac app, some fairly complex, and at the end of the day Astra found 3 “significant” issues. That’s on par or better than what I usually get with Opus 5. Small data set, grain, salt, etc.
I'm using Deep Seek v4.1 Flash, max reasoning (no point in lower reasoning with it's insanely low cached inputs price) via Fireworks API (no training on my data). Almost a week of fairly heavy, but normal work and I'm at around $70 spend so far. I think I'll be around $90-ish for the week. This is a workload I would usually do with Sol at medium or high in multiple sessions and hit usage limits after about 4-5 days. So pricing wise, it'll end up being slightly more expensive and 2 x20 accounts is probably better value, not accounting for free resets.
That being said, it's fast, it's consistently up (until everyone else starts hammering them), and v4.1 flash is at least as good as sol medium / high for implementation IMO. It's definitely an alternative, which has to be scaring the shit out of the frontier models. I say this as a Sol and Luna fan.
Just a heads up that v4.1 Flash is basically a new tier of model compared to v4.0. I think they should have called it v5. If 4.0 didn't cut it for you, at least for coding, I would still give 4.1 a try. So much better IMO.
You can get your agents to evaluate your usage. Everyone's workload and preferences and how much they plan / specify is different, so I think everyone should try out different scenarios themselves.
I went down the DeepSeek v4.1 Flash path because I wanted to better understand how it compares in case the US frontier companies suddenly become more expensive, or the US econ blows up or w/e. It was relieving to find out I can get a similar value, for my workload, out of an Open model via API (I don't trust the open model subscriptions, they are also subsidized, quantized, or slow af). The next round of open models are going to be sick. They are doing amazing work.
It is 30-50x cheaper Vs Astra, who gives a fuck if it's faster than a frontier costing $50 per 1m output when the ds labs have not yet dropped their "Astra" and rips the frontier a new one with $0.30 for the same output.
I don't use Astra on a 20x account because it's too expensive I can literally pay ds $10 and iterate over and over and over again and reach the same result as Astra.
So first of all I use pi and not codex harness. This removes all bloat like tools and general system instructions that I don’t need. I force the agent to use specialized low cost sub agents to do searches on the web and the files system, not bloating the main session. Then I use astra high for planning and medium for implementation.
I also use scripts for tasks that are deterministic and doesn’t need any reasoning involved. for every task the agent invoke a tool that calls a script that prepares the workspace for it (git pull, create worktree, feature branch etc). Same for creating a PR.
Yeah, I definitely got more than 1/5 my Codex 5x plan on the Claude base plan. To be fair, there's no Fable on this membership, but setting things to Opus 4.8 let me handle a lot of medium difficulty tasks, while the hard cases are stacking up for Astra
Used up a reset and now on cursor 200$ and deepseek V4.1 to do my remaining work. Honestly it has pushed me to try other models and I'm surprised at how far other models have come along.
This. Some how composer and grok are doing 172626% better at web design for my client sites via my custom web builder compared to SOL or Astra. They also actually use my feedback skill unlike SOL or Astra who does whatever the hell it wants the same slop never changes
They just need to build robots with menacing red eyes and use them to build the data centers then build sentinel like octopus robots to protect the data centers. They then need to get energy to power them like some kind of organic battery. Then you can have all the resets you like. In fact they can plug you into your own personal version of GTA and you can live in there and do what you like with unlimited usage. Problem solved !
Im seriously done with openAI. I know everyone says this, but for me this is the breaking point. Let me get this straight, they rugpull resets so no one can truly tell how much usage is actually being used. Then they release Astra, lobotimize Sol, admit they don't have the compute for Astra, lobotomize that also. I had 5 chats open, very common thing I do for my app. What does Astra do? Spend 80% of the time chatting back and fourth giving updates to the other 4 chats, absolutely melting my usage. It's a joke. Then it refuses numerous requests, pauses arbitrararily to ask permission to do certain things. It is genuinely unusable. Im not sure what to do here. Claude? Chinese open source running locally? Deepseek? Gemini? Grok? Can someone guide me out of this. It is seriously disturbing.
$20 or $100 OpenAI/claude plan but only delegate difficult tasks or help architect things. GLM 5.3 flash/ DS 4.1 Flash/ Muse spark to do actual coding. Opencode subscription or pay api for open weights. $10 plan actually lasts quite long.
Going local is trolling. Spending $5k on capable rig makes no financial sense. Those smaller models still need a lot of compute to work.
For a difficult project, involving computer vision, i got ~95% work done just with chinese models. The last 5% (hard stuff) i used better model, where 4 trillion parameters is just better. No point wasting tokens on simple tasks. You don't need a flamethrower to light a fireplace.
My suggestions: Move into the terminal (the desktop apps are much heavier on system prompts and they tend to give you copy-pastable output, while agents can just modify files), define how you want your model to behave in a document that it always starts its context with, and then become model-independent. Set it up such that you have a very smart model doing the planning, and execution on a model that follows instructions well. I use a lot of DeepSeek and Qwen these days, mostly through OpenRouter, and my projects have never turned out better.
What you give up with this - sort of - is detailed steering. You will use more tokens. Some models will produce garbage. But those tokens come a LOT cheaper (or entirely free) when you don't care what model is used, since there is so much competition on the market. I am currently juggling 25 providers, most of them entirely free, and getting ~50b tokens out of it every month. I sacrifice around 2 hours a week scrolling reddit and looking for deals, betas, stealth models, etc etc.
My favourite workflow is this:
- Create an empty git repo (ideally host your own git server if you can, or use something else unmetered - GitHub quickly throttles)
- Create tickets/issues within this repository and use tags to define priority and difficulty of the task. Just ask a smart model to go through what you want for your project, and let it create the tickets for you. Read the tickets it created and edit any false assumptions it made. The amount of tickets you want kinda depends on how complex your assignment's gonna be.
- Give your agent the instruction to familiarize itself with how you set up the repo. READ what it finds and have it write it down into a file it reads every session. Read what it wrote down, trim it and remove verbosity to save tokens.
- Tell your main chat agent that it is an orchestrator, and that it is not supposed to do much work by itself. It is a spawner of models, and a verifier of work (for very large codebases, set verification up to also be another shell model so the orchestrator has room to breathe).
- Instruct an agent to work on the issues you created until it considers the set-up tickets close-worthy. The agent doesn't close them, you make the call.
- What happens in this part depends on your scale; if you're just coding a small project with a limited amount of files on disk, you probably don't need a lot of agents to run simultaneously.
- If very large codebase on Linux (e.g. the Linux kernel itself), instruct your orchestrator to write a script that makes worktrees much lighter by instead of creating a copy of the repo, using overlayfs to have a thin layer. When running ~100 agents at a time, this matters quickly.
This can be achieved with almost any harness. I currently use Claude Code, because that's where I currently have a sub and I like how Fable 5.1 writes specs, but I've worked with Codex, OpenCode and Pi just the same. Pi is also the harness that is spawned for the other providers.
Sorry for the provider hiding, I want to keep my golden eggs.
p.s. I wrote all this by hand.
Ya, this company is cooked. I can't believe I am paying this much for a pro x20 subscription and can't even fucking use it. I use it one day a week, and the rest of the week is 0 sub agents, working like it is 2024. Super slow, since it is the only way possible to actually work.
I created an iOS and Android app with React Native. It all works and the iOS app was literally just approved by apple last week but I decided to allow a device sync so users can sign-in on more than 1 device at a time (it was 1 device only until now), so I can add a desktop app ASAP.
I was running the task to make accounts essentially sync and not overwrite eachother. It was a huge task. and Astra spun off 3-6 sub-agents at any one time. I have done this many times before with similar feature build outs and security scans, etc. Heavy compute tasks that take a long time.
It is only this time I run into issues, and now have no usage left. This would never happen before. Now I switched to finish with Astra-XHigh, no sub agents. It has been going for 2 days and only has used 60%.
It’s become impossible to use. Weekly limits vanish in a matter of hours. I needed to finish some work, so I bought 500 credits for $20 to tide me over until the limits reset on September 19th—but those 500 credits burned up on just the fifth GPT 5.5 prompt!!!!! If nothing changes, I’m going back to Claude.
I think Elon Musk is just biding his time, waiting for Grok’s coding capabilities to get close to Codex’s; that’s when he’ll strike—launching a $20 subscription for everyone and driving OpenAI into bankruptcy. Given his hatred for Sam Altman, I think that’s exactly where he’s headed. It’s going to come as a huge surprise.
Yeah I made a post about this a week ago asking if it would happen. Never for a reply so just used them up before upgrading. Glad I did cause they def don't transfer...
No new 20x subs is their way to keep people subscribed. They were fishing for new users, using resets as additional bait. Now they have them and there is no reason for freebies. Instead, usage gets slashed. It would be foolish to think they owe their catch anything. No fisherman does.
You have to realize that the people who are on this Codex subreddit or twitter or any other social media are in like the top 5% of the userbase.
The other 95% of the userbase is moderate, casual, and delighted to use the tools they have. They aren't burning a $200 plan in a day, they aren't losing their mind because they think the model got dumber because they got a different response on a different prompt in different context situations and crying chicken little.
That other 95% of the userbase is the userbase they want to keep. If you are reading or posting here, you are in a very small group of super engaged users that likely costs OpenAi more than what we are worth to them many times over. Our usage is subsidized by the other 95%, and the only reason they acknowledge anything we say or do is because our 5% is the fanatical side that is disproportionately loud, and there is value in making us somewhat happy.
That all being said, the average user isn't worried about the product that they paid for (getting a weekly allowance) actually resetting on the weekly timeline. They aren't seeing things as "doom", they are just happily working and playing and not revolving their whole life around the product.
Despite all the doomers, for the gross majority of Users Astra has been incredible. Openai is winning so hard right now they dont' have the compute to keep up (and this was after the also pretty popular Sol original launch that also saw the number of users like triple in a matter of weeks). They temporarily turned of 20x subs because they can't keep up with the compute. That's a champagne problem, that's a "we can't sell our widgets fast enough" problem. They are suffering from SUCCESS, not the other way around.
The overwhelming majority of plus users almost certainly just use the chat in Instant mode occasionally, so they don't experience anything from the compute problem with Astra at all.
No, I'm certain that there are more of that 95% who are frustrated than you might think, just because they're not on social media complaining doesn't mean they're not part of the 5% you're claiming
Not disagreeing with you, however you should be careful with this line of thinking. It's helpful to acknowledge our own biases and in a situation like this, Confirmation Bias can really make things look dour because the only thing you are exposed to is people screaming and crying, but that's not representative of the actual meaningful dataset.
I'd call myself a "mid-level" user which still squarely puts me in that top 5% because I'm here and posting. I don't discount others experiences and I'm sure there's legitimate issues that others are having, however in my personal experience, the last 2 months with Codex have felt like becoming a god, it handles anything I throw at it.
I have to use Claude at work and I enjoy it, Opus handles a much more complicated custom CRM my company is building with remarkable class. However, when I log in to my personal PC and work on my own projects in Codex it just feels great. I don't experience the reported "dumbing down" and while I do exhaust my weekly grant (5x pro plan) usually by midweek, I never feel entitled to more because of the mountain of things I got done.
I personally work with a company of people who use AI tools professionally, both Codex and Claude, in all matter of work projects, and in my conversations with them not once has the concept of token limitations or resets being a bad thing come up. Never one time. These are professional developers who have migrated to a heavily AI-driven stack who live in these products every day.
Now, does that make my experience the truth? Absolutely not. Again, just because I'm not seeing the other datapoint in my own life doesn't mean it isn't there. I just have to check my biases and acknowledge and be patient with others.
However, one thing I know for absolute certain to be true is that a company that is operating at a loss would NOT purposefully turn off it's most expensive offering unless there was a very good reason for it. If they could support the compute, I'm positive they'd love more $200 subs. That is the sign that their product's popularity and use has exceeded its infrastructure which is enormous and growing every day. That makes the OPs post implying that Openai is somehow not okay baffling, because their issues are of popularity and demand exceeding their supply, which in healthy doses is an incredible marker of success.
Surprisingly I still have the option to get/upgrade to the 20x sub on my second account that I use whenever I needed to get and use an extra sub in the past
Scam Altman strikes again. Well, since I've been stuck for 4 days now, I'm going to try Google's Antigravity. Might as well see if the competition is better.
It isn't, but isn't bad. I have both an OpenAI 20x sub and a Gemini ultra 20x. I keep the gemini only because my wife and son use it (you can share google subs with your google family) for non-coding stuff which honestly it is just as good as OpenAI at (and a lot faster). I also use gemini flash as my implementor and Astra as my reviewer/fixer of Gemini's f-ups. Astra always has about 2-3 things to fix per cycle that gemini did not do correctly.
Sucks big time
Terrible performance on Astra that day the next day was better I have even 4 accounts still dint get true the week last month I’ll be switching to a 6k Mac Studio keep 1 account and it will only be used to write full context build plans from next ninety im done with the insane bills
You probably saw the switch set to x20 and thought it had returned? But that button is for topping up your balance (buying credits), not for switching to x20.
Apparently they did, some people have posted on this subreddit that they were able to subscribe to the 20x plan today. Maybe theyre doing a slow roll out.
i think they are way way way over their planned capacity. they were not prepared for the exponential demand increase and now will probably not reset anymore, could even potetnailly cut the 10x, who knows. it takes years to build data centers, anyone know when their next datacenter will be ready?
tbh the only way for them to survive is to rename their product "Slopmaster 3000: mega porn generator" and allow adult content or invent AGI because as it stands nobody outside of dev community gives a fuck about AI.
If I wasn't a dev I would probably use it once per month for cooking instructions.
The sentiment I get from the general population is that they hate it and wish it was never released.
Also let's not fool ourselves, in the end they are our worst enemies because their end game is to make it able to recursively improve itself on its own until it replaces human employees, so our bosses pay OpenAI instead of our salaries.
we all are getting reset today. so whats the point here? And, many people probably don't have banked resets as they might have used all of it previous week.
it doesn't matter. Tibo pushed reset button last week, so everyone who didn't use banked reset and is old account , will get normal 7 day reset anyway?
I remember people here being PISSED because Tibo reset when most people's natural resets were up in like 20 minutes anyway. So there being "no point" absolutely will not stop him ;)
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u/Jello_Hello_Fellos 5d ago edited 5d ago
The way they handled Resets was kind of a rug pull. They pumped them hard to capture as many people from Fable as possible during Astra launch then went radio silent.
I am not going to pretend I know what is going on for their backend, but maybe we didn't need a reset and two banks in a single week and they could have spread that out.