It's amusing how desensitized we became to AI companies charging money however they like.
Just look at this announcement: "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them. The amount of tokens you consume will depend on things you can't control". What is left unsaid is that your subscription will contain an unknown number of those tokens you can't measure anyway, and that they will change the number whenever they feel like it.
You pay for… what, exactly?
I have no idea how this kind of sale is legal, especially in jurisdictions with consumer rights protection (EU).
this argument does not make a ton of sense to me. would it be better if they were charging by the byte? that's fixed and you can measure/control how many bytes you send, but you still have little control over how many bytes you receive, or whether those bytes are useful in the first place.
likewise, suppose you buy a 1gb plan from a mobile isp, then you find a youtube tutorial that you're interested in. the nugget of information you need is 23 minutes in, but you have no way of knowing that upfront, it may not even be there. you can exert some control over how many bytes you send in the headers of the get requests to youtube, but you have little control over how youtube compresses the video you requested. also you download 2 30s ads and a sponsored segment before finding what you were looking for. unfortunately you're now out of data on your plan. do you blame your isp for their shady sales practices? is it youtube's fault? what did you pay for?
Its similar to an taxi ride without the customer service or refunds.
You're billed by the hour / mile, you can choose an economy vehicle type, but the Toyota driver kept getting lost, swapping out vehicles, changing the price, when you finally reach your destination, you need another top up.
There is quite a lot of control over data usage on mobile phones. My current complaint is that the controls are not unified, but in many different places.
For example, on Android 17, there is Data Saver mode. Your per-app settings can control mobile data usage, in the background, or unlimited. Your WiFi networks can be individually labeled as metered, non-metered, or automatic. In the YouTube app, there are settings for your video quality, and how to adjust that quality based on your connection, if it is mobile data, or metered WiFi. YouTube Music has its own settings, and since it handles podcasts, you can opt out of video entirely.
Furthermore, there is monitoring of data usage. You can set the time period: for example, my mobile data metering resets on the 9th of the month. You can see usage for each app during that time period, split out between mobile and non-mobile data. I can set a warning threshold and a hard limit for mobile data usage.
I only use free LLMs, and not very much. I've only reached a limit once. But I do see that they have indicators or meters for usage. So perhaps check again, look harder, maybe ask your LLM how you can monitor and restrict token usage.
> "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them
They have an open source tokenizer on GitHub, they indicate which tokenizer they use per model, and they have a simple to use website that tokenize text and visualize it.
I'm not going to lie, one big reason I as a researcher have been a customer of OpenAI is that on their Pro plan Pro-tier model in chat and codex are decoupled in terms of billing. Anthropic instead billed you fully. This was very useful for long mathematical reasoning for me and I could attach outputs of my simulations in the context.
I will see once this transition actually happens but if another provider offers more for less and a cost of switching is inherently low as most of project lives on the disk and not in cloud, then why not move? For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
Same. I'm in the plus plan, the chat and codex/work are decoupled there and I basically never use the latter. I'll keep my subscription until the merge happens and I'll jump ship (where, tho?) if it severely limits my usage. At least it seems like "instant" is going to stay unlimited.
Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash. I can’t believe how far I’ve gone with only spending like $0.70 so far on credits
Question from a noob who’s never used openrouter: how do you actually do stuff with it other than chatting? Their website says it’s a unified interface for every model, but then they show a list of “most popular agents” (not models) that include things like “Codex” and “Claude Code”. Which implies I’m using openrouter to access other agents/harnesses, not just models. At which point what is openrouter doing for me?
I’d naively expect openrouter to be a thing that ships with its own agent/harness and lets you pick the model that requests are sent to. But the website implies that’s not what’s happening.
I can use DS and others through my Kagi sub. The thing about ChatGPT was the integrated environment/memory and the ability to create artifacts, which make it very useful for my job (teaching /researching). I don't use llms for coding, nor for agentic stuff.
When looking at the performance / price graph of artificial analysis, we can see that deepseek doesn't seem to have a better profile, just notably worse and slightly cheaper models, so in the future a chatgpt user will be better serve with switching to Luna or Terra that have better profile than deepseek.
> Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash.
I'm pleasantly surprised by grok models.
We use cursor at work and i'm at the $20/month plan.
I used to mostly use Gpt, composer and occasionally opus. But this month i maxed these models quota and I've been working with Grok 4.7 essentially non stop for the last two weeks.
Grok is fairly verbose and somewhat slower but in the end it does get the job done. I've done a surprising amount of work (planning, implementing, tool usage, analysis) on the base plan.
But you still wanted to say something, didn't you?
Well, if so I'll say something too – I would feel better giving money to a company led by a man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".
Ironically enough I'm currently on a ChatGPT Pro 200 package because OpenAI has been my platform for all my serious (non-coder-guided) coding work so far.
But with this new change I might actually finally jump ship. And maybe it would be to SpaceXAI and their Grok Ultra package. That's still $200/month for me, but I would get 50x more usage compared to plus, compared to "just" 20x with ChatGPT Pro 200. It looks tempting.
Musk's main concept summarised by Gemini:
"Truth as Safety: Musk argues that the most important aspect of AI safety is ensuring the system is maximally curious and honest, even if that truth is unpopular.
Raising vs. Programming: He compares developing superintelligence to raising a child rather than strictly coding it, warning that forcing an AI to hold contradictory or untruthful principles will break its logic and make it 'insane'."
Grok is the least "honest" out there. And you should 100 % never believe anything Elon Musk says, he's one of the most clueless and unreliable people in existence.
Grok had specific baked in instructions to avoid negative statements about Musk and Trump, how is that for truth seeking? No other LLM company has done that from what I know.
> For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
OpenAI is committed to helping us find the proper valuation of our workflows and we’re committed to paying far less than the perceived value these tools bring. Reminds me of the old Oracle pricing strategy of “how much you got?”
That also has been my mode of operation. Plan + review on GPT web and implement with Codex. Bugs, logs, diffs etc are frequently sent to chat to find bugs etc. Seems they're going full agentic and also trying to close that profit gap.
Same for me, I have Claude and codex. And usage limits in codex are hit more often. what was keeping me from switching was only the chat was virtually not limited. I guess it's time to switch.
From your experience, allowance for pure chat (no agentic stuff) is more generous in Claude than in The coming ChatGPT merge? Just asking, because I'm undecided as well. I'm on chatgpt plus now and chat is 99% of my usage.
Definitely not. Chat in Claude counts towards your weekly and 5 hour usage. Chat in ChatGPT was truly unique in that it was unlimited, even on the thinking modes.
It kills me to run out of claude code usage then my much more mundane usage, queries or web searches, is also cut off. Not doing that has been a big plus of chatgpt/codex in my mind.
Same, with this change my conversational usage is going to go to zero.
I wonder what impact this will have when a sizeable chunk of developers are no longer having convos and providing feedback? Could make a noticeable difference.
Started using my other AI services for conversational work, I lean on my AI subscription with kagi.com a lot more now when it's not related (in whole, or in part) with my dev work.
I modded my status line to show my remaining 5-hour and weekly limits, and when they reset. It's all available in the request data that comes back with every message.
I don't use Claude chat, but this is a great way to ensure my usage doesn't disappear on me.
I just recently tried this exact thing with GPT in Codex for my Plus plan. It said it would keep an eye on usage and note down checkpoints, but it totally forgot to.
Frankly, they could take a slice of the current quota and reserve it for non-code use and it would simultaneously be a objective downgrade but still improve the user experience.
No, because the free-tier chat is much worse than the paid-tier chat. For personal use, I only use Claude right now (I've flipped in the past as models have gotten better at different rates), but I still keep OpenAI around because paid ChatGPT is worth it as a product to me.
6 Pro has a limited number of messages per week, from 15 to 200. It is by far the most useful feature the plans offer, and can go through hundreds of thousands of tokens if not million(s) for one focused task. If the message limit remains, and it depletes usage in the normal chat and codex, it's a massive downgrade for a service that has reduced the actual, real-world API equivalent cost anywhere between x2-5 times in the past couple months, resets included. It used to be the differentiator vs. Anthropic's offerings. People trying to squeeze every single token out of those services routing requests to the webui are certainly in part responsible for this, there's tons of projects that allow you to defer or split into multiple concurrent chats tasks from codex to the webui chat.
They ought to reserve a very small amount of quota exclusively for chatgpt so it doesn't just shut off if you exhaust your quota using codex. If they don't it would make more sense to keep codex and chatgpt usage on different accounts, which I'm sure OpenAI doesn't intend to incentivize.
They need to rollout a 50 dollar plan then. I often run out of codex 5h limit and this would lock me out of simple google like queries. Can't justify the 100 dollar plan while also paying for claude and having a github copilot at work.
With the way things are, they actively drive you to get another $20 subscription at a competing service, since that's the only official way you can spend $40 on AI without going the full $100.
My usage pattern is "one or two evenings a week I'll sit down late at night and do something heavy". I have a life, y'know?
Their 5 hour limit works better with a "constant background trickle" usage pattern. I don't think the $20 account is a good fit for hobbyists-who-have-day-jobs (which is where I think it should be targeted). They should have an offering that meets "binge" needs.
I've been using Chat for all my Codex/Work tasks precisely because of the fact it didn't affect usage. Slightly less convenient and smooth but still directly against GitHub repos and other connectors so fantastic value in my Plus plan.
Another reason after the recent Pro 200/500 shenanigans to reevaluate my sub.
All good things and token-burning workarounds come to an end...
This isn’t good. I wish they would reverse it. It is easy to blow your codex usage — but then making it so CHAT is also busted is a shame. Please undo that.
I'm not surprised. At work, we paired devs and non-devs together, and we're sharing subscriptions, since we tend to exclusively use one or the other. It's like when Copilot was billing per query rather than per token, always bound to disappear.
I just got an email stating that "Chat and Work are coming together in one experience". Then, half way through it's the real headline: "A shared allowance for ChatGPT and Codex". Figured it was coming at some point...
In reality this is a non-issue because average chat conversations use 1/1000th the tokens of agentic coding usage (given they aren't reading their 1 million lines of generated code for every change), but at the same time... it should be a non-issue for OpenAI too. They talk about developing "intelligence too cheap to meter" and then go on to meter an absolutely trivial amount of usage for people already paying $100-$200 a month, embarrassing. The PR hit and psychological aversion to using ChatGPT this will instill in users will hurt them more than covering this usage could ever possibly do.
I say this working in an LLM startup where we serve literally unlimited usage (with the only caveat being that usage is serialized) via subscription and, unlike OpenAI, are actually profitable. I guess when you're hundreds of billions in the hole you're desperate to try anything to save the sinking ship, even if it clearly won't work.
Its not misusing the system at all - its accepting a level of friction and inflexibility in turn for cost savings. I've acknowledged its reasonable to change the model.
This is the exact reason I stopped using claude for chatting.
Few times I hit the claude code limits I was unable to ask the simplest question in a chat.
The major issue is going to be you ran your stuff dry with agents and now you are cut off from the chats. If instead, like 1% had been reserved, then you'd automatically be able to use the website and it would cut off people who set up skills to hack around it, which I suspect is why they're doing this.
There are various plugins to make ChatGPT queries in Codex, so you can use your allowance from there. I'm hoping this just closes that gap, and in reality it doesn't change anything.
Just a guess - MCP Tunnel loophole has been widely abused by the same types who kept their final session after hitting their limit open using a "fake" tool call (which unfortunately means we now all get cut off when reaching limits).
Others building harnesses around chat or simply falling back to manual copy/paste mode once hitting limits. Ironically AI makes it easy to automate the tiniest loophole to make it a problem as soon as word gets out.
It's a non-issue for everyone not trying to tokenmaxx and sticking to the spirit of subscriptions, but theoretically these folks SHOULD be on a higher tier that reflects their actual usage.
Edit: I feel like I'm coming off as a corpo sycophant defending OpenAI here... not my intention. Both big AI companies encourage this behaviour by creating complex and inconsistent rules around their plans such that it is impossible to know what a subscription is buying, a large chunk of the value coming from discretionary but quite predictably regular resets. As much as they have every right to change their plans... they got what they asked for with all the folks exploiting the loopholes. I just wonder if we'll ever get any sort of consumer law around these "mystery box" subscriptions with meaningless tiers so everyone can stop wasting energy on finding, exploiting and then fixing pricing loopholes.
We don't even have laws, against a storefront taking away your purchased shows/games/music due to a licensing issue or whatnot. Or if we do, they're clearly not enforced enough.
As for the 'mystery nature' of subscriptions; you can always pay API rates if you would like. If their API rates are too expensive, very cheap models like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, etc, are available.
Ah, so both Claude and Codex are going to have the same exact reduction for their two equivalent plans - 20x to 10x, at the same previous price - at the same time? I already knew about the ChatGPT announcement, but the claude one is completely new to me and completely unexpected. So much for competition...
> The reduction announced in our September 29 email is canceled. If you already had the higher Work and Codex allowance, you keep it. If you had the lower allowance, it has doubled to match. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
What I find interesting with this is that they dished out 65,000 credits to all Pro200 users as a "sorry we're doing this" but didn't take them back after this announcement.
Retail cost of $2500, would love to know their actual cost for these credits.
* 50% abandonment (since it does expire; and general prepaid credit abandonment is pretty high; especially given how much credits they dished out; so probably on the low end) = $188
Plus, it's unclear how many users opt out of training, so more usage and RLHF data on their best models from long-term power users, might work out to be a net benefit to them; since these kind of "non-abusable" (i.e. not announced beforehand) announcements don't suppress monetization as much.
Look up price versus intelligence for your favorite open model on artificial analysis and compare it with Luna, Sol, Opus, and Sonnet. Mind you, all of those are API prices, and you're still better off paying API prices than using an unsubsidized open model. Subscriptions from any of the major labs are an even better deal.
This is probably partially because people really started using the github connector in normal chat more heavily since it can also edit files. I've enjoyed using the normal quasi-unlimited chat mode as an occasional code reviewer as well for checked in code that doesn't affect codex usage, but seems that'll be gone. As will long complex conversations... What a shame, but the enshittification will continue until morale improves.
With everyone coming out of the woodwork and commenting about how they're effectively abusing the chat portion unlimited to do all the work, you know, I kind of get why they had to do this. At the same time, it really fucks over people like me who don't use ChatGPT for coding at all, but rather for like random personal stuff. The reason why I switched to ChatGPT over Claude was because of those five hour usage limit bullshit that Claude imposes.
Claude is already way superior in coding than Open AI atm. So coders are mostly using Claude
The models may switch occasionally in terms of who the class leader is in certain disciplines, but at the top level either provider is enough for professional coders.
Saying that either is only suitable for non-coders sounds gatekeepery and very out of touch.
Sama not too long ago said the "last resort" would be ads in ChatGPT, but maybe with cutting usage, there are more last resorts left. Maybe a useful signal for shareholders on when to bail (i.e. now).
I've been using ChatGPT since release and Codex since before ChatGPT was a thing (with the original Codex model). Am I the only one who didn't realize these limits weren't already merged since the current Codex app was released?
I really think that OpenAI during this period not only can't release anything good, but is doing more and more restrictions.
And then giving a bunch of bullshit reasons that make no sense.
I think everyone should start thinking about how these AI companies that have absorbed huge amounts of money are becoming more and more evil, and develop the ability to say "We have choices."
I think it's time to make these AI companies return the resources they have occupied, and seriously reflect on themselves.
I think we should make these companies' stock prices crash, demand a pause on unreasonable AI construction, and cancel subscriptions to those AI services that are expensive as hell and control your entire system.
Embrace open source, LLMs that you can privately deploy yourself, and keep your data in your own hands.
I think China is really doing well right now, open sourcing useful models, not letting hardware prices rise crazily, and even pushing down Token prices.
As for security issues, since they're already open source, we can do Fine Tune afterward to solve these problems.
And 4, someone has done experiments showing that 4 small models can reach the level of claude fable.
I really hate those arrogant AI giant companies. They act so calm and unbothered, wanting to own everything and control everything. It's disgusting.
I'm really looking forward to China developing a cheap, non-CUDA AI machine, keeping the price around 1000 USD, a machine that can run deepseek flash level models, becoming a dedicated AI machine rather than a training machine.
Then there will no longer be Token anxiety, no need to react to all kinds of decisions made by those AI companies, and no problem of giving your data to others.
It's amusing how desensitized we became to AI companies charging money however they like.
Just look at this announcement: "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them. The amount of tokens you consume will depend on things you can't control". What is left unsaid is that your subscription will contain an unknown number of those tokens you can't measure anyway, and that they will change the number whenever they feel like it.
You pay for… what, exactly?
I have no idea how this kind of sale is legal, especially in jurisdictions with consumer rights protection (EU).
This is a help page, not an announcement. You can find detailed information to help estimate costs elsewhere:
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
this argument does not make a ton of sense to me. would it be better if they were charging by the byte? that's fixed and you can measure/control how many bytes you send, but you still have little control over how many bytes you receive, or whether those bytes are useful in the first place.
likewise, suppose you buy a 1gb plan from a mobile isp, then you find a youtube tutorial that you're interested in. the nugget of information you need is 23 minutes in, but you have no way of knowing that upfront, it may not even be there. you can exert some control over how many bytes you send in the headers of the get requests to youtube, but you have little control over how youtube compresses the video you requested. also you download 2 30s ads and a sponsored segment before finding what you were looking for. unfortunately you're now out of data on your plan. do you blame your isp for their shady sales practices? is it youtube's fault? what did you pay for?
Its similar to an taxi ride without the customer service or refunds.
You're billed by the hour / mile, you can choose an economy vehicle type, but the Toyota driver kept getting lost, swapping out vehicles, changing the price, when you finally reach your destination, you need another top up.
There is quite a lot of control over data usage on mobile phones. My current complaint is that the controls are not unified, but in many different places.
For example, on Android 17, there is Data Saver mode. Your per-app settings can control mobile data usage, in the background, or unlimited. Your WiFi networks can be individually labeled as metered, non-metered, or automatic. In the YouTube app, there are settings for your video quality, and how to adjust that quality based on your connection, if it is mobile data, or metered WiFi. YouTube Music has its own settings, and since it handles podcasts, you can opt out of video entirely.
Furthermore, there is monitoring of data usage. You can set the time period: for example, my mobile data metering resets on the 9th of the month. You can see usage for each app during that time period, split out between mobile and non-mobile data. I can set a warning threshold and a hard limit for mobile data usage.
I only use free LLMs, and not very much. I've only reached a limit once. But I do see that they have indicators or meters for usage. So perhaps check again, look harder, maybe ask your LLM how you can monitor and restrict token usage.
The worst thing about tokens is that they call it "millions of tokens."
It should be megatokens.
One kilotokens would have to be 1024 tokens, and so on, as we’ve congregated on multiples of that for context window sizes.
Why?
> "your usage will be measured in tokens, which we do not define, nor give you a way to measure them
They have an open source tokenizer on GitHub, they indicate which tokenizer they use per model, and they have a simple to use website that tokenize text and visualize it.
Oh nice. How many tokens do I get with a Plus subscription per 5-hour quota, or per week? Does it change over time?
I answered about tokens being apparently something not measurable, I do agree that there is a lack of transparency on the subscription usage.
Ah, good point.
I'm not going to lie, one big reason I as a researcher have been a customer of OpenAI is that on their Pro plan Pro-tier model in chat and codex are decoupled in terms of billing. Anthropic instead billed you fully. This was very useful for long mathematical reasoning for me and I could attach outputs of my simulations in the context.
I also recall reading the following: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscription...
I will see once this transition actually happens but if another provider offers more for less and a cost of switching is inherently low as most of project lives on the disk and not in cloud, then why not move? For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
Same. I'm in the plus plan, the chat and codex/work are decoupled there and I basically never use the latter. I'll keep my subscription until the merge happens and I'll jump ship (where, tho?) if it severely limits my usage. At least it seems like "instant" is going to stay unlimited.
Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash. I can’t believe how far I’ve gone with only spending like $0.70 so far on credits
Question from a noob who’s never used openrouter: how do you actually do stuff with it other than chatting? Their website says it’s a unified interface for every model, but then they show a list of “most popular agents” (not models) that include things like “Codex” and “Claude Code”. Which implies I’m using openrouter to access other agents/harnesses, not just models. At which point what is openrouter doing for me?
I’d naively expect openrouter to be a thing that ships with its own agent/harness and lets you pick the model that requests are sent to. But the website implies that’s not what’s happening.
I can use DS and others through my Kagi sub. The thing about ChatGPT was the integrated environment/memory and the ability to create artifacts, which make it very useful for my job (teaching /researching). I don't use llms for coding, nor for agentic stuff.
Deepseek is truly a dumdum model if you move your full work into it.
For small evaluation ds is impressive.
Fine tuned DS4F is available from Particle.ai, same price but 20-50% more token efficient: https://openrouter.ai/particle-ai/particle-1
When looking at the performance / price graph of artificial analysis, we can see that deepseek doesn't seem to have a better profile, just notably worse and slightly cheaper models, so in the future a chatgpt user will be better serve with switching to Luna or Terra that have better profile than deepseek.
> Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash.
I'm pleasantly surprised by grok models.
We use cursor at work and i'm at the $20/month plan.
I used to mostly use Gpt, composer and occasionally opus. But this month i maxed these models quota and I've been working with Grok 4.7 essentially non stop for the last two weeks.
Grok is fairly verbose and somewhat slower but in the end it does get the job done. I've done a surprising amount of work (planning, implementing, tool usage, analysis) on the base plan.
Giving money to Musk, tho... I'm not saying anybody shouldn't... I'm saying I'm not going to.
i don't really care, frankly.
Why say anything then?
Sharing of opinion obviously, which is a purpose of this platform. Is this only valid if a poster also condemns all other views?
OP is not even demanding others to adopt it, so I don't see why it rubs people like this.
But you still wanted to say something, didn't you?
Well, if so I'll say something too – I would feel better giving money to a company led by a man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".
Ironically enough I'm currently on a ChatGPT Pro 200 package because OpenAI has been my platform for all my serious (non-coder-guided) coding work so far.
But with this new change I might actually finally jump ship. And maybe it would be to SpaceXAI and their Grok Ultra package. That's still $200/month for me, but I would get 50x more usage compared to plus, compared to "just" 20x with ChatGPT Pro 200. It looks tempting.
Musk's main concept summarised by Gemini: "Truth as Safety: Musk argues that the most important aspect of AI safety is ensuring the system is maximally curious and honest, even if that truth is unpopular.
Raising vs. Programming: He compares developing superintelligence to raising a child rather than strictly coding it, warning that forcing an AI to hold contradictory or untruthful principles will break its logic and make it 'insane'."
>I would feel better giving money to a company led by a man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI"
Everyone claims to be interested in the truth. Ideologically driven political agitators are not particularly credible on that point though.
Grok is the least "honest" out there. And you should 100 % never believe anything Elon Musk says, he's one of the most clueless and unreliable people in existence.
Grok had specific baked in instructions to avoid negative statements about Musk and Trump, how is that for truth seeking? No other LLM company has done that from what I know.
Reportedly LLMs from China churn and struggle a little with questions related to Winnie the Pooh:
DeepSeek’s Winnie-the-Pooh Problem (Feb 2025) - https://medium.com/humanai/deepseeks-winnie-the-pooh-problem...
> For my workflow pro astra has been very helpful, likely will be less so if it becomes far too expensive.
OpenAI is committed to helping us find the proper valuation of our workflows and we’re committed to paying far less than the perceived value these tools bring. Reminds me of the old Oracle pricing strategy of “how much you got?”
Is that the car dealership pricing strategy? How much do you wanna pay? We'll make it happen.
That also has been my mode of operation. Plan + review on GPT web and implement with Codex. Bugs, logs, diffs etc are frequently sent to chat to find bugs etc. Seems they're going full agentic and also trying to close that profit gap.
Same for me, I have Claude and codex. And usage limits in codex are hit more often. what was keeping me from switching was only the chat was virtually not limited. I guess it's time to switch.
From your experience, allowance for pure chat (no agentic stuff) is more generous in Claude than in The coming ChatGPT merge? Just asking, because I'm undecided as well. I'm on chatgpt plus now and chat is 99% of my usage.
Definitely not. Chat in Claude counts towards your weekly and 5 hour usage. Chat in ChatGPT was truly unique in that it was unlimited, even on the thinking modes.
It kills me to run out of claude code usage then my much more mundane usage, queries or web searches, is also cut off. Not doing that has been a big plus of chatgpt/codex in my mind.
Same, with this change my conversational usage is going to go to zero.
I wonder what impact this will have when a sizeable chunk of developers are no longer having convos and providing feedback? Could make a noticeable difference.
Started using my other AI services for conversational work, I lean on my AI subscription with kagi.com a lot more now when it's not related (in whole, or in part) with my dev work.
I imagine they’ll keep a buffer of usage for mundane queries and just block deep research tasks/image generation/etc
You can tell Claude Code to detect and watch its usage. Have it refuse to work at 90-95%.
I modded my status line to show my remaining 5-hour and weekly limits, and when they reset. It's all available in the request data that comes back with every message.
I don't use Claude chat, but this is a great way to ensure my usage doesn't disappear on me.
I just recently tried this exact thing with GPT in Codex for my Plus plan. It said it would keep an eye on usage and note down checkpoints, but it totally forgot to.
Frankly, they could take a slice of the current quota and reserve it for non-code use and it would simultaneously be a objective downgrade but still improve the user experience.
They actually have built and tested a feature called “Luna Reserve”, where you have an extra pool of Luna to tap into only when you’re out of usage.
I had it for a couple weeks before it disappeared. It probably decreased upgrades and monetisation too much.
The friction is intentional. Esp with the broader ‘AI trade’ showing jitters; they need good financial numbers.
I wonder if it makes more sense to cancel chatgpt pro, use the free version and stick with Claude code for development.
No, because the free-tier chat is much worse than the paid-tier chat. For personal use, I only use Claude right now (I've flipped in the past as models have gotten better at different rates), but I still keep OpenAI around because paid ChatGPT is worth it as a product to me.
Agreed, ChatGPT is better than Claude chat. Can Claude chat even search the web?
6 Pro has a limited number of messages per week, from 15 to 200. It is by far the most useful feature the plans offer, and can go through hundreds of thousands of tokens if not million(s) for one focused task. If the message limit remains, and it depletes usage in the normal chat and codex, it's a massive downgrade for a service that has reduced the actual, real-world API equivalent cost anywhere between x2-5 times in the past couple months, resets included. It used to be the differentiator vs. Anthropic's offerings. People trying to squeeze every single token out of those services routing requests to the webui are certainly in part responsible for this, there's tons of projects that allow you to defer or split into multiple concurrent chats tasks from codex to the webui chat.
They ought to reserve a very small amount of quota exclusively for chatgpt so it doesn't just shut off if you exhaust your quota using codex. If they don't it would make more sense to keep codex and chatgpt usage on different accounts, which I'm sure OpenAI doesn't intend to incentivize.
They need to rollout a 50 dollar plan then. I often run out of codex 5h limit and this would lock me out of simple google like queries. Can't justify the 100 dollar plan while also paying for claude and having a github copilot at work.
With the way things are, they actively drive you to get another $20 subscription at a competing service, since that's the only official way you can spend $40 on AI without going the full $100.
You can have two $20 accounts at openai that share a workspace, I believe. I think it's the pattern they recommend?
My usage pattern is "one or two evenings a week I'll sit down late at night and do something heavy". I have a life, y'know?
Their 5 hour limit works better with a "constant background trickle" usage pattern. I don't think the $20 account is a good fit for hobbyists-who-have-day-jobs (which is where I think it should be targeted). They should have an offering that meets "binge" needs.
Well this sucks, but not unexpected.
I've been using Chat for all my Codex/Work tasks precisely because of the fact it didn't affect usage. Slightly less convenient and smooth but still directly against GitHub repos and other connectors so fantastic value in my Plus plan.
Another reason after the recent Pro 200/500 shenanigans to reevaluate my sub.
All good things and token-burning workarounds come to an end...
This isn’t good. I wish they would reverse it. It is easy to blow your codex usage — but then making it so CHAT is also busted is a shame. Please undo that.
This will hurt people who use GPT-6-Pro which isn't easily available in codex and deep research.
Those were 2 flagship projects that will now make ChatGPT a lot less useful to people who pay.
We're in trouble. OAI wanted to raise $30B and raise $11B they are cutting costs.
I'm not surprised. At work, we paired devs and non-devs together, and we're sharing subscriptions, since we tend to exclusively use one or the other. It's like when Copilot was billing per query rather than per token, always bound to disappear.
I’ll turn off the Dot.
A Dot consuming credits passively with Astra just to deliver some low value “email says a package will be delivered” message.
Scheduled tasks have more control and focus.
I just got an email stating that "Chat and Work are coming together in one experience". Then, half way through it's the real headline: "A shared allowance for ChatGPT and Codex". Figured it was coming at some point...
Everyone saying they should keep the limits separate: they should give users one limit and a setting to partition it how they want.
I got it, too. Not surprising but this was definitely one of the deciding factors keeping me with ChatGPT. Much more willing to change providers now.
Maybe it's time to move to an open weight model.
recently, I wasn't able to configure my ads because I've run out of Codex tokens. I haven't opened the ChatGPT app ever since.
Does it mean that the regular chat will be subject to daily and weekly limit too?
Hoping not
In reality this is a non-issue because average chat conversations use 1/1000th the tokens of agentic coding usage (given they aren't reading their 1 million lines of generated code for every change), but at the same time... it should be a non-issue for OpenAI too. They talk about developing "intelligence too cheap to meter" and then go on to meter an absolutely trivial amount of usage for people already paying $100-$200 a month, embarrassing. The PR hit and psychological aversion to using ChatGPT this will instill in users will hurt them more than covering this usage could ever possibly do.
I say this working in an LLM startup where we serve literally unlimited usage (with the only caveat being that usage is serialized) via subscription and, unlike OpenAI, are actually profitable. I guess when you're hundreds of billions in the hole you're desperate to try anything to save the sinking ship, even if it clearly won't work.
This absolutely is not a non-issue for people like me who've been getting masses of coding work against github done via Chat without affecting usage.
We use Chat precisely because of that!
It's not unreasonable for them to switch but you really should not be so dismissive, this will likely have a massive effect on many.
But that's exactly the reason why they had no option but to merge.
This is a way of misusing the system and taking away GPU from people who are paying for metered work and the quotas became unsustainable.
Its not misusing the system at all - its accepting a level of friction and inflexibility in turn for cost savings. I've acknowledged its reasonable to change the model.
lol you are the problem
see my reply to the sibling comment.
Chat can download and analyze webpages, or multi hour conversation with dosens pages to fetch. It can be pretty significant part of usage!
This is the exact reason I stopped using claude for chatting. Few times I hit the claude code limits I was unable to ask the simplest question in a chat.
The major issue is going to be you ran your stuff dry with agents and now you are cut off from the chats. If instead, like 1% had been reserved, then you'd automatically be able to use the website and it would cut off people who set up skills to hack around it, which I suspect is why they're doing this.
There are various plugins to make ChatGPT queries in Codex, so you can use your allowance from there. I'm hoping this just closes that gap, and in reality it doesn't change anything.
Tell me more about the startup.
If it's a non-issue then why are they doing it?
Just a guess - MCP Tunnel loophole has been widely abused by the same types who kept their final session after hitting their limit open using a "fake" tool call (which unfortunately means we now all get cut off when reaching limits).
Others building harnesses around chat or simply falling back to manual copy/paste mode once hitting limits. Ironically AI makes it easy to automate the tiniest loophole to make it a problem as soon as word gets out.
It's a non-issue for everyone not trying to tokenmaxx and sticking to the spirit of subscriptions, but theoretically these folks SHOULD be on a higher tier that reflects their actual usage.
Edit: I feel like I'm coming off as a corpo sycophant defending OpenAI here... not my intention. Both big AI companies encourage this behaviour by creating complex and inconsistent rules around their plans such that it is impossible to know what a subscription is buying, a large chunk of the value coming from discretionary but quite predictably regular resets. As much as they have every right to change their plans... they got what they asked for with all the folks exploiting the loopholes. I just wonder if we'll ever get any sort of consumer law around these "mystery box" subscriptions with meaningless tiers so everyone can stop wasting energy on finding, exploiting and then fixing pricing loopholes.
We don't even have laws, against a storefront taking away your purchased shows/games/music due to a licensing issue or whatnot. Or if we do, they're clearly not enforced enough.
As for the 'mystery nature' of subscriptions; you can always pay API rates if you would like. If their API rates are too expensive, very cheap models like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, etc, are available.
Claude Max x20 became x10 and now this? I think the demo period is ending.
So happy to have the open models!
Claude Max 20x is becoming Ultra and the weekly limits aren’t changing: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2116220869479428500
In the plan it says 10x weekly usage instead of a general "20x" statement (which was confusing, admittedly)
https://x.com/JesusIsGod/status/2116228727059411248 am I misinterpreting? Or was it always 10x? Everything is so vague, no wonder they call it "vibe-coding" :)
edit: A lot of people on twitter say it has always been 10x for weekly so what do I know
My understanding is that it was 20x 5-hour-usage, never weekly. And they now just removed the 5-hour-limit on that plan alltogether.
Ah, so both Claude and Codex are going to have the same exact reduction for their two equivalent plans - 20x to 10x, at the same previous price - at the same time? I already knew about the ChatGPT announcement, but the claude one is completely new to me and completely unexpected. So much for competition...
ChatGPT Pro 20x will remain at 20x it seems https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9793128-about-chatgpt-pr...
> The reduction announced in our September 29 email is canceled. If you already had the higher Work and Codex allowance, you keep it. If you had the lower allowance, it has doubled to match. Your subscription price stays at $200/month.
What I find interesting with this is that they dished out 65,000 credits to all Pro200 users as a "sorry we're doing this" but didn't take them back after this announcement.
Retail cost of $2500, would love to know their actual cost for these credits.
Rough hand-wavey guess, assuming:
* 85% inference margins = $375
* 50% abandonment (since it does expire; and general prepaid credit abandonment is pretty high; especially given how much credits they dished out; so probably on the low end) = $188
Plus, it's unclear how many users opt out of training, so more usage and RLHF data on their best models from long-term power users, might work out to be a net benefit to them; since these kind of "non-abusable" (i.e. not announced beforehand) announcements don't suppress monetization as much.
They give (gave?) out resets like candy, I get the impression they pride themselves on how much compute they can give away.
Look up price versus intelligence for your favorite open model on artificial analysis and compare it with Luna, Sol, Opus, and Sonnet. Mind you, all of those are API prices, and you're still better off paying API prices than using an unsubsidized open model. Subscriptions from any of the major labs are an even better deal.
They are cutting off a workaround I have been using on the Plus plan, using it as a coding agent with unlimited usage.
Nice, you helped patch the loophole faster.
This is probably partially because people really started using the github connector in normal chat more heavily since it can also edit files. I've enjoyed using the normal quasi-unlimited chat mode as an occasional code reviewer as well for checked in code that doesn't affect codex usage, but seems that'll be gone. As will long complex conversations... What a shame, but the enshittification will continue until morale improves.
Not surprising: Claude has behaved like this for awhile and it was only a matter of time.
At the least, it deters people from spinning up Astra Pro requests via the ChatGPT interface willy-nilly.
With everyone coming out of the woodwork and commenting about how they're effectively abusing the chat portion unlimited to do all the work, you know, I kind of get why they had to do this. At the same time, it really fucks over people like me who don't use ChatGPT for coding at all, but rather for like random personal stuff. The reason why I switched to ChatGPT over Claude was because of those five hour usage limit bullshit that Claude imposes.
Claude is already way superior in coding than Open AI atm. So coders are mostly using Claude.
With this change even non-coders will jump ship. Not sure why OpenAI is doing this now. They should improve their models now to match the competition.
Claude is already way superior in coding than Open AI atm. So coders are mostly using Claude
The models may switch occasionally in terms of who the class leader is in certain disciplines, but at the top level either provider is enough for professional coders.
Saying that either is only suitable for non-coders sounds gatekeepery and very out of touch.
I can't blame them, I'm a huge fan of Opus 5.5 too.
for me Astra is the better model. Opus 5.5 is closed but when I need a slighter edge on a task usually Astra dominates
It won't affect pro users like me as we get unlimited usage. Even when running autonomous task's, the compute is much more than required!
Might affect go and Plus users.
It does say it affects Pro plans as well. Just FYI.
it should have been only one always, as in the end its model rate limits, so doesn't matter whats the client.
Sama not too long ago said the "last resort" would be ads in ChatGPT, but maybe with cutting usage, there are more last resorts left. Maybe a useful signal for shareholders on when to bail (i.e. now).
In the end, the service was maintained because of subsidies, and the service quality seems to be getting worse. There’s nothing that can be done.
I've been using ChatGPT since release and Codex since before ChatGPT was a thing (with the original Codex model). Am I the only one who didn't realize these limits weren't already merged since the current Codex app was released?
I think only people who used fClaude made that mistake. ChatGPT always used limits different from their other offerings.
i wouldn't knock it till i see how it affects usage.
Are they likely to be feeling generous and improve usage limits? I think it's easy to see what they're hoping to achieve with this.
I really think that OpenAI during this period not only can't release anything good, but is doing more and more restrictions.
And then giving a bunch of bullshit reasons that make no sense.
I think everyone should start thinking about how these AI companies that have absorbed huge amounts of money are becoming more and more evil, and develop the ability to say "We have choices."
I think it's time to make these AI companies return the resources they have occupied, and seriously reflect on themselves.
I think we should make these companies' stock prices crash, demand a pause on unreasonable AI construction, and cancel subscriptions to those AI services that are expensive as hell and control your entire system.
Embrace open source, LLMs that you can privately deploy yourself, and keep your data in your own hands.
I think China is really doing well right now, open sourcing useful models, not letting hardware prices rise crazily, and even pushing down Token prices.
As for security issues, since they're already open source, we can do Fine Tune afterward to solve these problems.
And 4, someone has done experiments showing that 4 small models can reach the level of claude fable.
I really hate those arrogant AI giant companies. They act so calm and unbothered, wanting to own everything and control everything. It's disgusting.
I'm really looking forward to China developing a cheap, non-CUDA AI machine, keeping the price around 1000 USD, a machine that can run deepseek flash level models, becoming a dedicated AI machine rather than a training machine.
Then there will no longer be Token anxiety, no need to react to all kinds of decisions made by those AI companies, and no problem of giving your data to others.
It's time, brothers.