Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message

Is this not just about extra credit? So what's included in the subscription doesn't change - just extra credits are now token based instead of message based? (For Plus/Pro)

Why not just attach a real dollar amount, rather than using "credits"?

Well, I know why. I just wanted to be snarky. It's just that trying to hide the actual price is getting a bit old. Just tell me that generating this much code will cost me $10.

The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.

Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.

For the past month, I've been claiming that $20/mo codex is the best deal in AI.

Now I'm going to have to find the new best deal.

So Anthropic bundled CC with Claude.ai cuz OAI bundled chatgpt with Codex, now OAI is unbundling, IPO must be around the corner. Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. How are the Chinese models looking?

The days of subsidized access is rapidly coming to an end.

Sounds like a death knell to me.

If I recall correctly, Ed Zitron noted in a recent article that one of the horsemen of his AI-pocalypse would be price hikes from providers.

Things must be bad if they're doing this before their IPO

this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.

I'm confused as to how pricing works.

For home projects, I almost exclusively use the web chat interface to code. I haven't done anything large yet so I will iterate and get the web chat to update code, print out the code that I copy and paste.

How does this differ in terms of pricing than Codex?

Any takes on how Codex compares to Claude? I mostly use it to run ahead, document, investigate and prep the actual implementation for Claude.

Gemini burned me too many times but maybe the situation has improved since.

What if the goal was to draw us away from building our own AI data centers with their cheaper prices then eventually make us pay up for the difference?

I wish the Chinese would release a model comparable with 5.4 and free me from this pain

Not only do I not keep up with the tech itself, I don’t even keep up with how to pay for it.

This pricing only really makes sense if the users can predict their usage, if not people that use this heavily are just going to be hamstrung and are going to start rationing their usage.

from what they wrote, they're just changing how they measure the usage; might even be a good thing if you manage your context right:

> This format replaces average per-message estimates for your plan with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It is most useful when you want a clearer view of how input, cached input, and output affect credit consumption.

5h and weekly resets remain, but the quotas are now ‘filled’ differently?

Makes sense. Right now the subscriptions are like Uber as I remember it in NYC in 2014.

Token-based usage accounting is more accurate and therefore more sustainable than message-count-based usage accounting. It should've been this way to begin with.

The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.

wouldn’t it be “usage based pricing” not “pricing based usage”

So migrate to gemini now?

Does this mean there’s no such thing as a “subscription” to ChatGPT for businesses? I thought they offered businesses a subscription with some amount of built in quota previously, including for the side products like codex and sora.

good. just like the Claude model. getting the pricing to be in line with costs is the only way this remains sustainable.

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