Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

help.openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 212 posts

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

#161

Post by lelanthran »

thejazzman wrote: post #132
SoftTalker wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like saying my plan to get rich buying up $10 bills for $1 hit kind of a rug pull in that people aren't selling them for that price anymore.

The only catch is that you’ve spent many $1 and you don’t get any of those $10s unless you get over the finish line In that sense your analogy is kinda good. I totally agree the current situation is like getting my solo start up funded and subsidized … but with only like 4 months runway now that the prices are skyrocketing, vs ~2+ for a typical YC venture

Yeah, but... it's rocketing for everyone at the same time on all the providers at once.

IOW, you are no further behind nor further ahead than your competitors compared to 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago and 1 decade ago.

Everyone has the same tools you have. The only advantage you get is if you make your own tools (I did that, and pre-AI, was able to modify my LoB WebApps at a rate of 1x new API endpoint, tested and pushed to production, every 15m).

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

#162

Post by lelanthran »

supliminal wrote: post #33
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #15

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.

Every time an Ed Zitron article is posted on HN, it is met with a torrent of vitriol and personal attacks. The articles are okay if not overly wordy but I don’t see how the subject matter elicits that strong of a response. At any rate, this observation is not unique to Ed, lots of people have made the same conclusion that the math doesn’t add up from a business profitability perspective.

> The articles are okay if not overly wordy

Did you mean instead "The articles are okay if overly wordy"?

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

#163

Post by bornfreddy »

cyanydeez wrote: post #30
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally every VC funded consumer product has switched from a "growth at all costs" phase to a "Now we hike prices, make money, and generally enshittify" phase, and tons of those companies are still around (e.g. Uber), so I'm not sure why anyone thinks it would be much different for AI.

yes, but how many succeed without any kind of moat or having destroyed the existing companies? I'm still running local LLMs and finding perfectly acceptable code gen.

Which ones, if you don't mind sharing?

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

#164

Post by zozbot234 »

redml wrote: post #115

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.

> this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down

I've also heard that, we're near the end of the exponential.

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

#165

Post by lelanthran »

aurareturn wrote: post #136
cyanydeez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but how many succeed without any kind of moat or having destroyed the existing companies? I'm still running local LLMs and finding perfectly acceptable code gen.

No moat --> It's basically OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic left at the SOTA. Maybe soon, we'll have 2 left.

> No moat --> It's basically OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic left at the SOTA. Maybe soon, we'll have 2 left.

Yeah, but do we even need them? Non-SOTA is still pretty damn good; remember last year, pre-SOTA? How many people were boasting 10x - 100x productivity increases using the end-2025 models?

So the non-sota models support doing 10 hours of work in 1 hour. Many people would be fine with that. Fine enough that they aren't going to spring for a SOTA model that cuts the 10 hours to 0.5 hours, they're just going to use the cheap models to cut the 10 hours down to 1 hour.

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

#166

Post by lelanthran »

vardalab wrote: post #151
redml wrote: post #115

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.

What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.

> They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.

That's the problem - these small businesses are writign code, models from last year are good enough for them, and as a small business they can easily shell out for hardware to self-host.

The minute businesses take-up AI for their business processed, the will to buy each employee a subscription is going to go the way of the dodo.

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

#167

Post by muyuu »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #11

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.

What has actually changed? It's unclear how much can you do right now, unless they've already switched you to the new plan and you're speaking from experience.

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

#168

Post by philipallstar »

toddmorey wrote: post #88
hmry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature

You joke but as a parent, I’m so sick of the gem packs, etc. they try to push on the kids to obfuscate your actual spend on games in real world money. And now it feels like the are gamifying the compute we use for work for all the same reasons.

Board games do not have this problem.

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

#169

Post by __mharrison__ »

aulin wrote: post #116
__mharrison__ wrote: post #11

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.

GH Copilot is still the best deal, while it lasts

Yeah, it's really good. Probably going to be the next best deal until they cut back.

I need to try the command line version.

Post reply on HN