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

91–100 of 212 posts

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

#91

Post by scosman »

rustyhancock wrote: post #84
scosman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out z.ai coder plan. The $27/mo plan is roughly the same usage as the 20x $200 Claude plan. I have both and Claude is a little better, but GLM 5.1 is much better value.

Agreed, I use Z.ai and the usage is fantastic the only temper that recommendation that it's often unreliable. Perhaps a few times per week it's unresponsive. Maybe more often it seems to become flakey. It's very variable though recently I'm noticing it's more reliable but there was a patch where it was nearly unusable some days. I guess I won't complain for the price and YMMV.

Agreed. They had a rough patch around the 4.7 to 5 upgrade. New architecture required hardware migration. The 5 to 5.1 upgrade was much smoother (same architecture new weights). As you say, little rough around edges, but still great value. Trick I learned is that it's max 2 parallel requests per user. You can put a billion tokens a month through it, but need to manage your parallelism.

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

#92

Post by matt_heimer »

spijdar wrote: post #86
matt_heimer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only good for the web based UI. If you want Gemini API access which is what this article is about then you must go the AIStudio route and pricing is API usage based. It does have a free usage tier and new signups can get $300 in free credits for the paid tier so it's I think it's still a good deal, just not as good as using the subscriptions would be.

No? Isn't the article about Codex, which is roughly equivalent to "Gemini CLI" and Google's Antigravity? Google's subscriptions include quotas for both of those, albeit the $20 monthly "Pro" plan has had its "Pro" model quota slashed in the last few weeks. You still get a large number of "Gemini 3 Flash" queries, which has been good enough for the projects I've toyed with in Antigravity.

I guess that's true but I find Google's models better than their public tooling. The Pro subscription includes "Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI" but the Gemini Code Assist plugin for IntelliJ which is my daily driver is broken most of the time to the degree that it's completely unusable. Sometimes you can't even type in the input box.

The only way I can do serious development with Gemini models is with other tooling (Cline, etc) that requires API based access which isn't available as part of the subscription.

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

#93

Post by matheusmoreira »

Rastonbury wrote: post #9

So Anthropic bundled CC with Claude.ai cuz OAI bundled chatgpt with Codex, now OAI is unbundling, IPO must be around the corner. Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it. How are the Chinese models looking?

> Writing is also on the wall for CC usage based subscriptions now that main competitor effectively got rid of it.

And I just subscribed for a year's worth of Claude... Terrible timing I guess. Do you know if the open models are viable?

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

#94

Post by operatingthetan »

spijdar wrote: post #86
matt_heimer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only good for the web based UI. If you want Gemini API access which is what this article is about then you must go the AIStudio route and pricing is API usage based. It does have a free usage tier and new signups can get $300 in free credits for the paid tier so it's I think it's still a good deal, just not as good as using the subscriptions would be.

No? Isn't the article about Codex, which is roughly equivalent to "Gemini CLI" and Google's Antigravity? Google's subscriptions include quotas for both of those, albeit the $20 monthly "Pro" plan has had its "Pro" model quota slashed in the last few weeks. You still get a large number of "Gemini 3 Flash" queries, which has been good enough for the projects I've toyed with in Antigravity.

Google is by far the best deal for AI, they give you so many 'buckets' of usage for a variety of products, and they seem to keep adding them.

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

#95

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

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.

A fundamental architectural problem is that they genuinely do not know what a query will cost ahead of time.

Even for a single standalone LLM that's the case, and the 'agentic' layers thrown on top just make that problem exponentially worse.

One'd need to entirely switch away from LLMs to fix this problem.

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

#96

Post by babyshake »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #95
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.

A fundamental architectural problem is that they genuinely do not know what a query will cost ahead of time. Even for a single standalone LLM that's the case, and the 'agentic' layers thrown on top just make that problem exponentially worse. One'd need to entirely switch away from LLMs to fix this problem.

Isn't this an orthogonal issue that doesn't affect whether billing is done with credits or money?

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

#99

Post by le-mark »

JesseTG wrote: post #18
thejazzman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of a rug pull to effectively raise the price like 10x. I can’t afford to finish some of my projects with this change

Is writing it by hand the old-fashioned way not on the table?

What am I an assembler programmer now?!? Am I to plug wires and flip switches!?!

/s

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

#100

Post by kingstnap »

operatingthetan wrote: post #94
spijdar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Isn't the article about Codex, which is roughly equivalent to "Gemini CLI" and Google's Antigravity? Google's subscriptions include quotas for both of those, albeit the $20 monthly "Pro" plan has had its "Pro" model quota slashed in the last few weeks. You still get a large number of "Gemini 3 Flash" queries, which has been good enough for the projects I've toyed with in Antigravity.

Google is by far the best deal for AI, they give you so many 'buckets' of usage for a variety of products, and they seem to keep adding them.

If you aggressively use all buckets Google is incredibly generous. In theory for one AI pro subscription you can get what is a ridiculous return in investment in a family plan.

You could probably be charging google literally thousands if all 6 members were spamming video and image generation and antigravity.

Post reply on HN