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

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

#181

Post by surgical_fire »

mike_hearn wrote: post #110
rvnx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions of USD in debt, a business model bleeding cash with no profit in perspective, high-competition environnement, a sub-par product, free-to-use offline models taking off, potential regulatory issues, some investor commitments pulling out... tricky. But let's not cry for the founders, they managed to get away with tons of money. The problem is for the fools holding the bag.

How is it a subpar product? I've been very happy with GPT 5.4 and the Codex CLI tooling, as well as ChatGPT web. I'd say product is one of their strengths.

It's heavily subsidized.

I pay for it, but I don't think it's worth much more than the 20 bucks a month I have been paying.

Once they start charging something that makes sense, I doubt it will be as good.

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

#182

Post by surgical_fire »

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.

> Every time an Ed Zitron article is posted on HN, it is met with a torrent of vitriol and personal attacks.

It's why I started to pay attention to what he says.

Dude is a bit verbose, but his rationale is solid. If it gets the panties of some people here in a bunch, he may be on to something.

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

#183

Post by HumanOstrich »

lelanthran wrote: post #146
HumanOstrich wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex That's not true. First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. Second, if you look at the prices for bundles of _extra_ credits and then do some math on the Codex rate card, you'll see that there's no way they would work out to be the same or similar.

> First of all, there's no dollar amount tied to how many credits you get for a subscription. I don't understand what you mean here; their official comms is: Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks. To me, anyway, that means that GP was exactly right - they'll give the $20 subscriptions $20 worth of…

1. Look at the new rate card for how many credits are used for each category (that's what the discussion is about).

2. Look at some of your typical sessions for token counts and calculate how many credits that would have been.

3. Look at the rates for extra credits (that's the only place credits have a price).

4. See that you are getting more than $200/mo worth of credits where we have evidence of the value of a credit.

If that doesn't clear it up, then I can't help, sorry.

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

#184

Post by ssl-3 »

thejazzman wrote: post #145
HumanOstrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a price hike, it's actually making it easier to understand relative usage for different models/features.

I have no idea what I’m getting for $200/mo at this point. Maybe that’s on me, idk.

I have no idea what I'm getting for $20/mo, either. (But I do know that it's at least $180 less than what I could be spending, I suppose.)

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

#185

Post by HumanOstrich »

thejazzman wrote: post #145
HumanOstrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a price hike, it's actually making it easier to understand relative usage for different models/features.

I have no idea what I’m getting for $200/mo at this point. Maybe that’s on me, idk.

Fair point. We only have clear evidence they're being more transparent about credit pricing and value, but it's unclear whether that'll make people burn through usage faster or slower.

The fuzziness is intentional. It gives them wiggle room and obscures how much "value" you actually get from $200, a 5-hour block, or a week. That keeps the tension manageable between subscription pricing and pay-per-token API pricing, especially for larger businesses on enterprise plans who want transparent $-per-MTok rates.

If they were fully transparent, like "your $200 sub gets you up to $2,000 of equivalent API usage," it would be a constant fight. People would track pennies and scream any time 5-hour blocks got throttled during peak hours. Businesses would push harder for pay-per-token discounts seeing that juicy $200 sub value.

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

#186

Post by hmry »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #109
mrweasel wrote: post #63

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.

I can think of a few other reasons: - Not everyone uses dollars. - The price of credits in some currency could change after you bought them. - The price of credits could be different for different customers (commercial, educational, partners, etc) - They can ban trading of credits or let them expire

> Not everyone uses dollars.

> The price of credits in some currency could change after you bought them.

> The price of credits could be different for different customers (commercial, educational, partners, etc)

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't every other compute provider manage that without introducing their own token currency? Convert to the user's currency at the end of the month, when the invoice comes in. On the pricing page, have a table that lists different prices for different customers. I fail to see how tokens make it clearer. Compare:

"This action costs 1 token, and 1 token = $0.03 for educational in the US, or 0.05€ for commercial in the EU"

"This action costs $0.03 for educational in the US, or 0.05€ for commercial in the EU"

> They can ban trading of credits or let them expire

That sounds extremely user-hostile to me

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

#187

Post by bloppe »

thejazzman wrote: post #128
bloppe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can call it a rug pull when everybody saw it coming from miles away

I avoided Claude code and such the first few months because I thought it was all billed by the API. Which I knew was not worth it to me at all. Then I realized I was an idiot and this was magic. But it now seems more like an introductory offer to use the API, as opposed to an alternative product / way to use their API product. I thought it would get increasingly expensive, like say the $200 plan becomes $400. Switchi…

But it was well understood that the subscription was heavily subsidized. Whether or not it was a "separate product" doesn't matter as much as the fact that pricing was not sustainable.

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

#188

Post by fc417fc802 »

nojito wrote: post #7
m-hodges wrote: post #3

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

So many folks are just burning tokens just to burn them. The infrastructure build out just can't keep up with it.

Almost as though selling below cost or over capacity will backfire if people find unexpected uses for your product.

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

#189

Post by redml »

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.

Honestly? It was the claude code leak that did it. There was a lot more smoke and mirrors than I anticipated, the poisoning tool calls, how their prompting is, how "messy" a lot of it was etc.

I meant that I thought the exponential with the models is slowing down (AGI, etc). The application though for regular people will continue to go forward.

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

#190

Post by thejazzman »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #177
thejazzman wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve pivoted to writing native iOS, macOS, windows, Linux apps. Most of my career has been front end web. It would take me awhile just to learn and practice, vs having my visions working in hours or days I’m not ready to unveil the thing I alluded to, it’s important to me that it’s good and polished. But I’ve done quite well so far developing in Swift, Rust, Go, and coming up with marketing and design — things I defi…

> So much domain expertise or tedious math involved — I simply wouldn’t have bothered on my own, pre-AI This is what I was alluding to. AI did not let you write software you couldn't otherwise make, or let you write it faster. You skipped doing the research because AI gave you plausible results, but without doing the research yourself you cannot be sure of it's accuracy. That isn't faster software development, it's r…

I guess it’s my bad for trying to do more than I could otherwise do alone.
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