Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by anuramat » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:14 AM UTC

hmry wrote: post #186

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

otherwise you end up with "get a $20 subscription for 1000% more value -- equivalent to $200 in API usage!!![1]; [1] -- compared to API pricing for american companies on the first weekend of the month between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC+8 during full moon"

in any case, better than what anthropic does

> user-hostile

credits do expire (I thought they always do?), apparently it's not really up to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46230848

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

#202

Post by adrian_b » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 7:49 AM UTC

Art9681 wrote: post #200

AstroBen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kimi K2.5 (as an example) is an open model with 1T params. I don't see a reason it has to be local for most use cases- the fact that it's open is what's important.

That is just idealism. Being "open" doesnt get you any advantage in the real world. You're not going to meaningfully compete in the new economy using "lesser" models. The economy does not care about principles or ethics. No one is going to build a long term business that provides actual value on open models. They can try. They can hype. And they can swindle and grift and scalp some profit before they become irrelevan…

A model with open weights gives you a huge advantage in the real world.

You can run it on your own hardware, with perfectly predictable costs and predictable quality, without having to worry about how many tokens you use, or whether your subscription limits will be reached in the most inconvenient moment, forcing you to wait until they will be reset, or whether the token price will be increased, or your subscription limits will be decreased, or whether your AI provider will switch the model with a worse one, and so on.

Moreover, no matter how good a "frontier model" may be, it can still produce worse results than a worse model when the programmer who manages it does not also have "frontier intelligence". When liberated of the constraints of a paid API, you may be able to use an AI coding assistant in much more efficient ways, exactly like when the time-sharing access to powerful mainframes has been replaced with the unconstrained use of personal computers.

When I was very young I have passed through the transition from using remotely a mainframe to using my own computer. I certainly do not want to return to that straitjacket style of work.

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

#203

Post by aurareturn » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #165

aurareturn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Despite this, OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can't keep up with demand. That should tell you about what people want.

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

#204

Post by cyanydeez » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #203

lelanthran wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Despite this, OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can't keep up with demand. That should tell you about what people want.

Ok, ok, so they can't keep up with "Demand". Now lets go parse what that demand is:

Is it: We want to use this to "Kill a bunch of people"

Is it: I'm very lonely, and need something to tell me suicide is ok

Is it: Google is so filled with ads, I'm just going to ask the LLM what to buy

Is it: A useful coding tool to improve work flow towards end products.

Cause, if we ignore ethics, some of that demand will generate revenue to pay for it's existence; the others will do nothing of the sort.

Just because there's demand doesn't mean that demand equates to the value of the product. There's lots of demand for LED light bulbs, but once those light bulbs are sold, that demand disappears into the night. This isn't an analogy of AI, but to demonstrate you can't just wave your hands and say "demand leads to a sustainable business model".

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

#205

Post by supliminal » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #162

supliminal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Probably!

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

#206

Post by mike_hearn » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #147

mike_hearn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Will you be as happy when your $1000/mo of inference you’ve been getting for $30/mo is gonna cost $1000/mo?

I don't use anywhere near $1000/mo of inference. But yes, the question of what to do when prices go up a lot does concern me. However, with respect to product alone, Codex is still very good.

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

#207

Post by ttul » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #126

ttul wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. That’s not a bad thing. Giving away stuff for free - or even apparently for free - encourages a poor distribution of value.

> I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. Jesus, the spin on this message is making me dizzy. They finally try to stop running at a loss, and you see that as "they've been so successful" ? Here's how I see it: they all ran out of money trying to buil…

I built a web-scale infrastructure service that supports tens of millions of end users over a 15-year timeline. One of the most successful moves we made was to charge customers appropriately for their usage and to adjust how we calculate usage from time to time in order to tweak that feedback signal. It's amazing how customers learn to adapt in response to even very modest financial signals - in the aggregate.

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

#208

Post by verdverm » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #202

Art9681 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just idealism. Being "open" doesnt get you any advantage in the real world. You're not going to meaningfully compete in the new economy using "lesser" models. The economy does not care about principles or ethics. No one is going to build a long term business that provides actual value on open models. They can try. They can hype. And they can swindle and grift and scalp some profit before they become irrelevan…

A model with open weights gives you a huge advantage in the real world. You can run it on your own hardware, with perfectly predictable costs and predictable quality, without having to worry about how many tokens you use, or whether your subscription limits will be reached in the most inconvenient moment, forcing you to wait until they will be reset, or whether the token price will be increased, or your subscription…

The vision has been that the open and/or small models, while 8-16 months behind, would eventually reach sufficient capabilities. In this vision, not only do we have freedom of compute, we also get less electricity usage. I suspect long-term the frontier mega models will mainly be used for distillation, like we see from Gemini 3 to Gemma 4.

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

#209

Post by lelanthran » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #203

lelanthran wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Despite this, OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can't keep up with demand. That should tell you about what people want.

> Despite this, OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can't keep up with demand.

Yeah, see, if I was selling $5 for 1$, I probably wouldn't be able to keep up with demand either.

There's a reason all the mainstream token providers have been tightening the pricing screws this year.

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

#210

Post by piyh » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

purrcat259 wrote: post #51

piyh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already paying for Google photo storage, AI pro for an extra $7 is a steal with anti-gravity.

Good luck sticking within limits, I have been burning up my baseline limits insanely fast within a few prompts, a marked change from a few weeks ago. There's a few complaints online about the same happening to multiple users. Otherwise anti-gravity has been great.

I use a quota monitor and grind out code on Gemini 3 flash. Only go to sonnet or pro is there's issues flash can't deal with or I have a critical architecture I need nailed on the first try.

I still review every line generated.

Gemini 3.1 pro on the web interface still works if my problems are scoped to a single module or two and my better model quotas are exhausted in the IDE.

For $7 over what I was already paying for storage, primarily using flash is still a good development experience for me.