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).
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
Deepseek is truly a dumdum model if you move your full work into it.
For small evaluation ds is impressive.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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'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 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.
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.
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.
Chat can download and analyze webpages, or multi hour conversation with dosens pages to fetch. It can be pretty significant part of usage!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.