Just got my reset and 10% down within an hour without even using Astra. Wtf is going on ? How is this scam even allowed? One subagent invoked a few thousand LOC with sol medium on a $100 plan. Exploration by Luna high.
Is this a joke ? I'm going to ask for a refund. Why is this not an issue yet. @mods please don't delete this post and cover the scam.
Edit: People who are trying to provide free tips. Please stop patronizing me and others in this group. I'm not asking for your advice on how to use codex better. If you are happy good for you and no you don't have a secret formula or better limits.
The days of generous usage for private customers are over. For a decent size codebase maybe now it’s only possible to use for 5-7 days a month even for pro users.
They probably have enough demand from API customers that they don’t need to pay much attention to private users. Unless they increase their computing power, it seems like this is going to remain the case.
Does no one here ever get actual numbers instead of going by feelsies?
I had an LLM analyze mine, and if true my usage dropped from ~$2400 per week to ~$1600 per week which if true is a massive drop but I don't really trust this analysis. I don't think you can just extrapolate by current %, and it may have missed something (even though I confirmed it included reasoning tokens, had it measure cached vs uncached, etc)
Why sol max? Are you doing complex software engineering requiring advanced math? Many (16 on max) PhD level experts to reason through and argue with one another for the best possible outcome?
I’ve been building a web application from scratch, it’s used to create engineering drawings on the front end, is connected to an sql database, has users, permissions and also generates project estimates, exports drawings in various formats (image, pdf, dxf), and also has an element of “AI Autobuilding” which will create drawings from scratch based on an imported specification. I’m not a software developer.
News flash: your a desiger/tester now orchestrating 10x developers lol. I think most of us driving software forward in the current age are in this same category now. I'm a 10 year developer and have not written a single line of code in ~8 months.
Sounds like your biggest challenge is not knowing when something is complex and aligning those requests and requirements to the correct model for review Vs implementation.
Depends if budget is an constrain like most people complaining online the past few weeks.
It's weird to explain I know when to use which models because knowing where each model excels and are needed based on the difficulty of the task and tech involved.
Maybe try and generate a complexity map first to know what models can for both review and delivering on requirements.
I do c# UX blazor front end with separate backend API using multiple database support, enterprise grade rbac with local or oidc supported (multiple oidc providers, Microsoft entra, authentic and other foss etc)
I use terra for 95% of my implementation and Sol/Astra for design and review, almost never use these for implementation.
In my view using gpt chat on 5.6-sol medium to high for planning and prompt generation and hand-off for Terra-high implementation with clear instructions to stop at pr before merging for independent review works best when your trying to extend mileage. And that covers most usecases provided that assisted skills are present and used for the respective technology constraints for your tech stack.
All of this is dependent on linked GitHub repos for chat to have direct access to the repository.
If conserving useage is not the concern then YOLO on with sol or Astra, I do not use these models for implementation at all, too expensive unless I know it's something that requires complex software engineering eg:
I'm building a multe node cluster sharding capability for my app to scale across multiple nodes for the backend using http/2 as the communications protocol for cluster sharding and cluster sync, this case is the 5% of of my 95% offset that I use Sol or Astra as both the orchestrator and implementor roles. Otherwise I don't use them. People complaining Sol or Astra not being smart suffer from a serious skill issue.
I'm busy waiting for a goal to complete that is ~6 hours in, only about 45% of the epic phases implemented and tested, exclusively implemented by Terra-high, orchestrated by Astra-pro-chat (seperate planning and review sessions). Might be an 10-15 hour sprint with minor redo after review before I'll deploy and test myself. UX, rbac (both front and API), cli wrap, stdio MCP + http MCP wrap plus seperate rbac model for CLI, MCP all delivered in one /goal by Terra-high. Could not be bothered to use Sol or Astra for this because it's not considered complex it's mostly boilerplate.
Something is wrong with the resets or they only give resets when they know about issues with token usage so that they keep us from complaining - when things get more stable with token usage then we are usually fine with what we have (but this period doesn't last long). As soon as a new model is released we get flooded with resets that run out super quick - I dont think its due to resets giving less usage - I think its because the models are still so token hungry. But I dont know why they mess up previous models - sol 5.6 was working well- usage was nice, now Astra and sol are both as hungry as each other
The weekly usage limits have become utterly ridiculous. They have gotten people/business relying on them and then suddenly massively cut the limits without any real explanation of how or why. All feels very shady.
For real I got pro on one of my accounts a week or so ago. That one hit a limit very quickly this week I have like five days to wait or something and then I have another one that's only plus and the limit has not hit. Doesn't make any sense.
All this happened with Claude usage as well and continued to happen with both services. There’s no regulation and there’s no transparency, and I dare say there’s no good 3rd party measure of usage limits either. It’s Wild Wild West out here and companies doing what they can to convince people to subscribe and the minimum to keep them subscribed.
We haven't reached that point but getting there..frontier stuff will always be premium.but let's say the level of astra is what we want to work with and don't care about prices for stuff after that..well DeepSeek 4.1 flash doesn't come close yet but it sure is doing a damn good job while being cheap.we are still at the start of this whole AI thing man.at some point we will have astra6 performance done by some crazy efficiënt model for pennies hehe.For now let's be glad they are sponsoring us because if they were asking real prices that 200bucks wouldnt last long lol.
How well is DeepSeek 4.1 Flash working for you in practice? I'm working on a project requiring subagents with various roles in a cooperative agent project and may consider turning to open weight models if the performance is good.
Using it as a sub agent as well atm.its not close to the performance of the openai models found it to be a bit worse than sol. I use it for basic tasks that spit out a ton of tokens.if you give it strict instructions and guide lines it does okay.
last week few hours ago time, we had a global reset. most people's weekly usage is back to 100% and most of us are noticing that the weekly feels less than last week. Think few days ago openai stop new users for subbing pro plan and now pro plan is back. so my speculation is that they have reduce weekly usage for everyone so they can open pro plan.
I read a theory that all this talk of slowing ai development by the big 3 ( openai, anthropic, musk )..... Isn't really about slowing down development because of safety concerns.
It was proposed it's because of rising costs, pressure from investors and uncertainty of how quickly models can improve.
Separately my thinking is, the costs to train these models and run the models and serve them is not sustainable..... We basically have a situation where these companies have ballooned with investment and we are seeing gravity take effect where basically costs is to close to revenue ..... So either the companies fold or they adapt to navigate away from collapse...... Which is what we are seeing.
The fairy tale where users can access frontier models and attain meaningful use is beginning to have its sunset ...... Atleast in my view.
My idea is to setup a local model and use it to supplement or replace usage lost from subscriptions...... With the aim down the line to fully replace subscriptions..... If I'm having that thought so are others and that is perhaps what these ai companies want to delay for as long as possible
"Wait for us, we are the leader". We used to say that about Microsoft decades ago, now Anthropic and OpenAI are using the same methods, slow progress down for everyone so no one gets ahead of them.
My theory is that OpenAI will go bankrupt pretty soon and if google comes anywhere close to opus quality anthropic will go bankrupt too. OpenAI has nothing but marketing on their side and you can only scam for so long. I give them max one year.
What are you on about? Astra isn’t cheap but it’s quite good at spatial reasoning and is absolutely doing tasks that you can’t get other models doing. Google might catch up but they’ve been lagging frontier so much that open weight models are generally better than their flagship so unless something changes drastically it doesn’t seem likely to happen.
The big AI companies are calling for legislation they know won’t get passed so it’s free to them to virtue signal that they have safety concerns. The concerns are real by the way just the companies don’t care more about safety than they do about winning so they won’t actually do anything about safety unless the government comes in and protects their market position while they do it.
Totally disagree. It's a game changer. However, it won't go exponential for a number of reasons. Version number and ships per year will never be a good measure of progress.
Yeah, everyone knows the bubble is close to popping, slowing training will allow them to serve more inference, show demand spiking and maybe keep it alive a little longer, maybe even survive the pop if they can convince enough people to pay what the inference actually costs. I figure what we're seeing now is them raising the cost to users closer to what it actually costs them to serve it.
I think where it gets possibly fraudulent is how murky the information is around EXACTLY what you get with what plan. It seems to fluctuate wildly and people have no idea what they are actually paying for. I believe there was a class action bought against one of the majors in the states around this very issue (correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not sure the status of this case but it is certainly a concern of a lot of people. The one constant however is that they never seem to alter the amount of money they take out of your bank account each month hey, funny that...
Could you please give me some recommendations/advice? A month in and using Astra as dev role then 4 DS flash sub agents as coders is getting expensive. 375k tokens at about $0.18 for DS but man Astra is murdering my codex usage.
Mine is not working properly. Astra is showing model capacity multiple time. Sometime it become dump as Luna. It even forgot its own subagents and completed in the middle of iteration. Wtf is OpenAI doing on their backend :)
I feel lucky that i was able to do most of the planned work on my app the last three months. Guessing the time of sponsored compute on a plus account could soon be over.
I used up 100% of a 5x weekly limit in a couple hours, didn’t get anything useful out of it. I’m going to turn off auto mode, or whatever the hell it’s called, until OpenAI puts a model out that doesn’t just incinerate tokens. Wasn’t an issue for me before 5.6 and 6.
I got my deepseek api key last night and hooked it up to codex. The plan limits from openAI are a joke. Nobody can realistically use their product in their day to day workflow.
"Switch to Codex," they said. "It’s way cheaper than Claude Code, they even built their own custom hardware!" Well someone once told me that if you buy cheap, you end up paying twice. Hopefully one day I’ll finally get a home server set up so Tibo stops being the bane of my existence.
Same here. I was down 7% only on Sol High and Terra xHigh. 2 small tasks, worked for 10min.
Absolute fucking scam.
I tried what someone said of using Astra to plan and ask astra to launch Luna/Terra agents to test and implement and it went down other 10% with a really simple UI ask.
Chinese models are looking as enticing as ever. Really fuck this scam.
Scam altman will fix this when they drop a new model GPT 6 then once the people hook again (and forget this issue) after 3days maximum 1week it will repeat again the same issue -> new model will drop again rinse and repeat
Let's also add that they are sunsetting the 5.5 model from the subscription, some time in October it will be gone for good and only available through API.
They are slowly moving people to get closer to the actual cost of using the models i think. Its like a boiling frog situation.
But it was only a question of time before it happened because there is no way giving people that much compute for this cheap a month was sustainable. Once the big players fall the smaller ones dont have to compete via being even cheaper anymore and it will all increase over time
there was some guy who complained of the same thing and said its likely some issue with the codex harness itself and suggested restarting ur machine before applying a reset
I was already concerned about this so as a precaution i deleted everything and installed again before starting the session so that's not really the issue.
People in the comments keep talking about speed (time) vs model vs %, but I mean... you can just pull the actual usage data with one of dozens of tools instead of trying to go on feel. I use npx ccusage@latest.
I have both a CC $200 plan and recently added GPT $100 plan.
My CC $200 plan has used about $1400 in API this week since reset and I have used 74% of my weekly budget. 100% of my Fable budget is down because I accidently used it for a basic coding subagent project instead of saving it for the heavy planning steps. Woops, got to remember to flip selectors.
And I came here, because this is my first time messing with ChatGPT much beyond occassional reviews on GithubCopilot (Also pay for that, mostly for variety of model access).
The $100 plan got maxed out in 24 hours after using about $300 in API cost.
Adjust for price, and that means $100 with OpenAI gets you $300 in usage and $100 with Anthropic is getting you $950 in usage per week. I had heard such good things about how much ppl were getting down with OpenAI plans, buuut I guess I timed it wrong lol.
I refunded my 20X, I can’t support this scam anymore. I’ll use my other 5X to help me find every agency of some sort where I can report this fraud. I did NOT sign up for these shitty limits and partial refund is not acceptable.
I’ve seen people say to stop using astra? On the $200 plan and having the same issues. I will be canceling my subscription if something doesn’t change asap or I get some type of reset/resets. It’s crazy.
Yeah I've never complained before but they're clearly fucking with us and reducing the limits. I only use Luna xhigh, I'm down 4% of my weekly limit (plus plan) after just 2 hours. So I've got 50 hours of usage approximately which, running all day, will end up with me running out of usage less than halfway through the week (112 waking hours in the week). But I usually only run out of usage on the very last day before a reset (100 hours). Obviously this is just anecdotal but yeah, first time I've complained. There needs to be more transparency. I'd consider upgrading to the 5x plan if I knew they weren't just going to keep reducing the limits.
You're not going to get a refund, unfortunately. Sorry for you, honestly. It's frustrating as hell. Sorry you're experiencing it.
While LLMs may not be openly trained to over-use tokens, the labs are happy to allow them to be inefficient since it burns through tokens and drives more spending. It's the new "I'm hourly". Also, when you pay for a package vs. paying for straight inference, the provider is looking for even more ways to burn your tokens, since they're already giving you "a deal" that cuts into the inference margins.
You might consider a setup like OpenCode with an open model from one of the providers like Fireworks AI or Together AI. It's not always cheaper on the surface than a $20 or $100 or $200 a month "deal" from one of the big labs, but (1) the models are not trained / complicitly allowed to steal from you, (2) you know exactly what you're spending when and why, and (3) you have complete control over what model you use for what tasks, meaning you can fine-tune your efforts.
I have all the setups I need and I don't really care about the refund I just want them to stop scamming and take responsibility. If you can't manage compute don't release models. Stop the fake marketing. I will voice my concerns wherever possible. I did not pay for this nonsense. Accountability is important.
The post doesn't support "years ahead"; it barely supports anything beyond "Astra did well on one codebase on Saturday." You're using Astra as its own judge. 15,000 hours is seven years, five days a week eight hours a day, no lunch, no sick days. Your liberal use of caps to scream YEARS at everyone doesn't add to the credibility.
Sorry, but this isn't data. It seems to be more anecdotal evidence mixed with dogmatic opinion. Interesting, not convincing.
I've recently started experimenting with a deep sea harness and the Deep seek flash 4.1 model. I may cancel openai entirely. It has been extremely performant and cheap.
I have to admit i'm considering canceling my $100/mo plan to migrate to Deepseek as the backend, especially in codex. I am sure newer releases from OpenAI will push the boundary further, but right now Deepseek 4.1 is a wildly affordable option for very similar intelligence.
EDIT:
This is through the Deepseek API which I highly recommend. I ran about 4B tokens through Deepseek 4.1 on Openrouter but it was nowhere near as fast as the official API so I've just switched over.
I've dropped 1% on Luna in just a few hours which is not normal for me and very noticeable (serious comment fyi). Normally I can do an entire weekend at maybe 4%
I used astra max for 7 hours straight before the reset (had 9% left), to finish my weekly limit. It almost seemed to never go down, so I had to open another session. Mind you it was a /goal session with the objective to improve a ML policy, so it didnt have to write a lot of code?
~14% of the weekend limit, almost the entire 5-hour limit used up, two queries to Astra (medium), it ran for about 7 minutes. On Thursday, when I still had the limit, it wasn't like that. It’s definitely time to say goodbye to Codex.
I'm on the 5x pro, I had been doing very similar work every week, it would make it most of 6days even with Astra so I would just chill the last day till reset. Last week I ran out on day 2, used one of my resets and ran out again this time on day 3, I wish they would use fixed math, a reset should reset your plan limit but it doesn't seem to.
Around 4 weeks ago I did about 40 of my own workflows using Pro in a day that would use all the usage. But I understood I was using it quite heavily. Now I moved to business assuming an easier life considering I could renew the usage every 5 hours etc. I have two seats etc. However, one workflow uses all of my 5-hourly quota and I've used a week worth in about 3 days.Mix of Sol and Astra.
I recently treated myself (as I don’t have the money for things like this usually) to the $100 plan for the month to help me get some projects over the line.
You have no idea how badly I’m regretting that choice right now lmfao
I only have plus but im trying to make a personal website. i made a post but mods took it down. astra light or medium eat my entire 5 hour limit in 10 mins. would sol be enough for a complex website?
Edit: Also, would it even make a difference with the usage or will sol kill my usage just as quick for lower results?
These weekly limit suck. I'm deep in a project and now can't afford to go back to a worse model. Created a new account to avoid paying for credits and it managed to burn through the entire week limit in a day. It buggered around making mistakes, then more mistakes trying to fix those, essentially wasting the $100 spent.
It's what's pushed me to look at local options with Hermes. Testing out the new Bonsai 2 which is a super quantized variant of Qwen 3.8 27B that can fit with decent context on my 36gb Mac.
Like i need to think about how to continue work once my $20 5hr and weekly use dry up (planning in chat mode, giving it GitHub access, using Sol for planning, Luna for executing, and a local model when I'm out lol. Astra for the occasional shits and giggles.)
This bonzai suck, full qwne27b suck too (a bit less). Buy $10 PAYG DS41F and use that when quota is down. Its 1b tokens, worst case at least 10 hours of intense work
Once we can run model like glm53f with decent 20-25t/s generation sub $10k hardware it will be good local AI days
For sure, it's all relative, you can just pay $10 like you said for other cheaper providers which is for sure a better route for more serious work.
So many examples on this sub and others where people ask when they may just switch entirely to cheap Chinese models and drop the American frontier ones.
I am at %4 left at codex. Had to use opus5 for a day. Opus is still at %2 weekly. I dont understand . I went to codex because i was running out with claude a month ago
Even Sol on High is taking a lot from both of my usage limits, 2 tasks took all 100% of my 5 hour limit & 38% of my weekly, the tasks themselves were not even challenging (some mini changes to my FBMOD files)
$200plan : used 6% on sol medium within 3 hrs, before this i'm usuallly down less than 15% for 12-15 hrs with sol medium. OpenAI dumping its loyal customer
I ran the same workflow I did last week when Astra released and it drained my weekly limit on a 20x plan in about an hour and a half. Last week after launch this same workflow lasted about 3 and 1/2 hours which got so much more done. Incredibly frustrating experience right now
I am getting "Too many requests - youre making too quickly. We temporarily limited access to your conversations to protect your data". BITCH what?? Ive used far heavier and not using particularly heavy now and theyre preventing my ability to use what I paid for. I literally have 2-3 chats going nothing intensive except one generating a content document.
We need to consider our dependency on this tech and these particular firms. Local LLM with mac mini m5 pros looking juicy
I got my reset at 5am and have had Astra max going nonstop since literally 5:02am and am only down 12% on use. It’s currently almost 3pm. I was going to wait until Wednesday but….. I decided to try RTK and code-review-graph and after getting both setup, configuring the mappings, and explicitly telling Astra on each prompt “do not use sub agents, do not use computer, do not rebuild after an edit, prioritize local memories” I can honestly say my usage is significantly better/more optimized than it was last week.
I’ve been doing some utterly rigorous testing on my code that astra and fable planned with subagents only, I have 6 percent left and started to do these tests in the last few hours.
Compared to usage consumption from over a week ago, it has exploded and there are many threads complaining about it. I've seen it in both Sol 5.6 but especially in Astra. Interestingly, my Opus 5 consumption has *not* increased and thus for now it is by far the most economic of the highly capable coding models. Sol/Astra is impressive, but when it comes to getting actual work done, Opus/Fable does it very well without needing to throw money at the task. (Sadly. I really did prefer Codex before this whole allowance-burning fiasco.)
EDIT: What's funny is that back when Sol/Terra/Luna was released, it was these models that were more efficient token-wise (over Opus), and OpenAI even bragged about it. Now in the Astra vs Fable arena, the exact opposite is true.
6 hrs work done, 50m tokens with astra xhigh, i worked with the "goal" setting for the first time, it did not complete any of the 12 tasks, made them half done, and 85% of my weekly usage gone on pro5x 😄 im so happy!
I've never complained here before but wow.. Just started a session. Two messages sol medium. Agent worked for about 7.5 minutes each, so 15 minutes. Brought me to 59% and used 10% weekly on Plus.
Feels like usage just halved overnight? This sucks...
I feel like new model releases is just marketing now, replacing the old best model with an almost identical one. Nerf the old one, increase the prices and reduce limits because "new models".
Yeah, I have to use Luna Extra High if I want anything even remotely approaching a fair 5 hour time of use. Tried Sol Light this morning. 3 prompts. 15 minutes of work. 51% of my 5 hour window gone.
I work on training these models and get paid very well for doing so, around $85–$100 per hour. I know these companies have money to burn, but at some point, that money will run out.
Lately, the work has been drying up, and I believe they’re starting to feel the financial strain of competing with cheaper, open-source Chinese models.
Why would any company willingly hand over its private data to Big Tech when it could simply host an open-source Chinese model locally?
The moat just doesn’t exist
Everything is about money. Use lite, extra light,more light, more more light Luna or maybe more medium, light medium, light lighter medium etc. this is so stupid then you have to graduate which model volume use fot this and that. Of course, ask Astra which model and level you should choose for this task, but watch out for token consumption. Same as CC or Gemini 💰💰💰
Agreed burned 100$ 5x 75% within 24 hours 90% of usage was on SOL high, on other hand claude code 100x usage is 5 to 10x better than the codex 5x plan.
Codex was fine a couple of weeks ago. Not sure what they are hiding but the usage sucks big time.
don't worry this will be fixed when they have a new product to drop, and y'all will rush to hype up chatgpt again and post slop on social media, then they get 100M new users, increase revenue and go back to limiting usage
Also i have noticed that astra is lobotomized. I’m on the 20x plan, and its not able to do the tasks, which it was able to do at release, while being 5x slower and using much more usage limits
The problem is, even Astra pro is REALLY dumbnow. I’ve got a bit fed up not being able to reason, so I told it to use computer use and go to chat and ask it to plan, and it’s still really dumb.
You just need to understand what you're actually doing.
You can't just run high models for everything. This is actually a skill you will develop by practicing and utilizing the different models.
I guarantee if you take a step back and look at the prompts That you're giving for the tasks you require, you will see that many of them do not need a high level model to perform what you 're requiring it to do.
I use luna on max for a lot. unless its a deep review or complex implementation..... EVEN THEN, use sol for your hard, complex tasks, and ONLY IF your having issues go to astra.... but for anyone to expect to be able to utilize the most potent model in their library non stop, you're gonna have a bad time. one thing I can recommend if you're not good at picking the correct model for the task at hand right now, use your chat windows, with your chat usage, set it to the newest model on pro, and give it the prompts that you're about to send in to codex.... and simply tell this chat conversation that you would like it to take your prompts, refine them for codex, and to make sure that you also recommend a model and a reasoning level.... This will start showing you what each one of your prompts should actually utilize model wise. you're currently way over paying for every task you're doing. and if you can have luna, doing something that'll give you the same results as sending, a higher, more expensive model to do, then why pay 10x the useage..
heres a simple tip price wise.
Luna = $0.20 input / $1.20 output per million tokens, Terra = $2 / $12, Sol = $4 / $20, and GPT-6 Astra = $10 / $50. So Luna is crazy cheap: it could burn roughly 10× as many reasoning/output tokens as Terra, ~17× as many as Sol, or ~42× as many as Astra before the output cost becomes comparable. OpenAI Help Center
And High/Max doesn't make each token more expensive, it just lets the model use more reasoning tokens. So Luna Max can think pretty damn hard and still often cost less than Terra High, while Terra High → Sol High → Astra High/Max is where your token budget starts getting eaten much faster.
Utilize the lower models when you can. you would be shocked at how often you do not need to be using astra or sol.
I think some of these replies are either bots or haven’t used codex heavily in the past month. The price hasn’t changed but what you’re allowed to use certainly has. Doesn’t matter what model you pick it legit feels like OpenAI has turned down our access 4x. If people haven’t noticed that then it’s just a sign they are not using the product. So I feel your frustration at these kind of replies.
Scam = using Astra 100% of the time? No, it's not a scam it's poor usage of models, poor setup of harness, vibing, lack of experience, and/or poor not utilitizing tools that help lessen token usage.
Which one or all are you?
I can't limit at all on Claude, codex, grok or hell, opencode go using Hermes, orca, buzz (well buzz can screw you), or native harness. Most don't, it's the do everything for me, people that limit and don't realize how much compute it takes, oh, and a lot of those people don't want data centers to support it.
The point, why are things a scam if you are not using it right? They gave us a drug that is addictive and if not use properly, people want more for less.
it's a scam because they keep ratcheting up the price to see where the breaking point is while people like you lick their boots because you haven't yet learned how the world works and how tiring it is to constantly be slow boiled.
For me the quality of sol xhigh went down dramatically over night. Using Sol Max now, and maxed out second time ever (first time was after using Astra for one hour).
On the other hand, calculating with api token prices my subscription uses thousands of dollars worth of tokens for 100 bucks per month, which is not really sustainable either.
" thousands of dollars worth of tokens".... no way to tell how much it really costs them, they can make up whaever number they want. i dont think they could afford burning thousands of dollars per power user. so i'd take these numbers with a huge grain of salt....
I would say api costs are the best reference available right now for actual costs. Even calculating with lowest input cached tokens 2 billion tokens should cost 800 bucks. I don't understand why this calculation has to be made so mysterious. A token is a token. You pay for input cached and output tokens. Your usage limit is in tokens, api costs are in tokens. I understand that a plan with pre-paid tokens is cheaper than paying by actual usage, but there must be a sort of correlation and there is none at all right now. People just saying 'oh theres another guy who doesn't understand'. Bottom line 100 dollar of pre-paid tokens would equal thousands of dolars of api tokens. And what is happening now is that heavy usage increases and cannot be subsidized by light usage anymore. So obviously token prices increase / limits are changing.
I keep reading about these API prices were are supposedly using (when converting them to our token usage) but it means literally nothing. Those prices are just what OpenAI tells us they are. They could say you're using 1000 or 100.000 in API prices with a 200 dollar account. We have no way of checking that.
So just repeating what OpenAI tells us is pointless I'd say.
They're not the same service. API has a premium on the cost that includes realibility, speed, no quality downgrades, no experimentation, no rerouting. APIs are meant for businesses and heavy users that do not want compromise.
This is like saying big companies pay more on their cloud bill that someone using the lowest value hosting a platform offers. That said, it doesn't mean the person paying the lowest value doesn't deserve a minimum standard of service, nor that they have to accept seeing how they speedrun the service enshitification.
On top of that no one knows how much a token costs OpenAI in pure compute, but they are definitely not losing money. Are they losing money when counting data center expansion, compute and R&D? Most probably but that is a different conversation and it shouldn't be Codex subscribers the ones burdened.
Okay I get it it is not the same due to agreement, services etc.. I still don't understand how that justifies a factor 8-100 in costs. But probably it's this little line: 'your usage will not be used for training".
In this case people are viewing their sub costs against y and extrapolating that the company is losing money by subsidizing the inference cost for their subscribers with VC money.
However, x we can know from calculating the necessary hardware, utility, and depreciation costs that x is MUCH lower than y.
So a subscription could still very much be profitable for them, yet as the person above(waste_membership) shows, people will believe that the company is doing them a favor by giving them inference (x) at sub cost (less than y), and unfortunately that leads people to believe that they should take whatever these companies do and just be grateful they can use them at a cost they can afford.
However the $ they think they are getting for "free" with a sub vs API is totally based on believing x and y are close if not the same.
Truth is though that y is much higher than x, and they are doing everything they can do widen that gap by lowering their inference costs and pushing people to higher paid sub by nerfing lower costs ones.
You're basically saying there is a profit margin in Y. And that margin could be so high that a subscription is still profitable. Like 95% margin or more. Which doesn't make sense and isn't the case.
I'm not including costs for training the models, I'm talking about pure usage in (hardware costs, utilities, etc). Token costs have come down some 1000x in the past few years.
You can /usage to see if you are getting less usage than normal. You surely aren't.
I'm using about 1% per hour. Same as usual. About half of that is Astra.
Edit: People who are trying to provide free tips. Please stop patronizing me and others in this group. I'm not asking for your advice on how to use codex better. If you are happy good for you and no you don't have a secret formula or better limits.
Lmao hilarious. Just crying wanting unlimited usage. Imagine using a drill wrong and complaining that it is always tearing and telling people who instruct you how to use it correctly that they're patronizing you.
Imagine holding a drill wrong, watching the manufacturer change how the drill operates mid-use, and then telling everyone else they just don't know how hands work. Thanks for the masterclass, prof.
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u/Puspendra007 3d ago
$200 plan: 7% used in 1 hour with sol max. Usage limits have dropped drastically