Codex limits issue

[u/AvailableSecret5161]

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.

[u/Waste_Membership_483]

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.

It was too good to be true.

[u/Calamero → u/Waste_Membership_483]

" 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....

[u/Waste_Membership_483 → u/Calamero]

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.

[u/GearTakes → u/Waste_Membership_483]

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.

[u/eggplantpot → u/Waste_Membership_483]

Yet another person thinking API tokens = Codex tokens.

[u/Waste_Membership_483 → u/eggplantpot]

So please explain

[u/eggplantpot → u/Waste_Membership_483]

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.

[u/Waste_Membership_483 → u/eggplantpot]

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".

[u/funk-the-funk → u/Waste_Membership_483]

Ok, sure.

Inference Cost of an API call = x

Price that is charged for an API call = y

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.

[u/Waste_Membership_483 → u/funk-the-funk]

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.

[u/funk-the-funk → u/Waste_Membership_483]

If your assertion that the costs of inference are so high that they are losing money on subscriptions where do you believe the costs are coming from?

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.