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OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users

107 pointsposted 11 hours ago

by MC995

(9to5mac.com)

123 Comments

phyzome

10 hours ago

"During this period, the company also reset users’ weekly usage early on several occasions to celebrate milestones"

Such a casino vibe.

vatsachak

9 hours ago

Hey I work in the casino industry and we have regulations!

F7F7F7

10 hours ago

Both OpenAI and Anthropic use a lot of casino/slot machine mechanics in their TUIs and Apps so likely intentional.

TomJansen

10 hours ago

Do you have any examples of this? I am not sure if I understand what you mean

I think the whole nature of agentic programming is variable reward: kick off a bunch of prompts, obsessively check “which one nailed it??” Or at least I get a dopamine hit when the agents notifies me that it’s done with its turn.

pelagicAustral

9 hours ago

I don't really know if really fits the description, but the whole effort (`\effort`) gate is pretty on point. I mean, you can go up to Ultracode which takes over the whole bottom portion of the terminal with a shiny glow, Ultracode for sure give a lot of "up the ante" vibes...

matheusmoreira

8 hours ago

Timers. Such as these five hour and seven day limits.

If you see any sort of timer anywhere, you are in a Skinner's box simulator. You are being subjected to positive and negative reinforcement via the reward schedule. This is habit forming.

hzhshdjej

8 hours ago

explains the junkie behavior from the boosters. up all night just one more prompt and what did they build? well it's almost done

it's like nitrous oxide, you're sure to have that epiphany with just one more pull

matheusmoreira

8 hours ago

It's definitely addictive and it does create problems.

The timer only starts when we message a model, and we always want the timer to be counting down. So if a timer resets at 3 AM, we are incentivized wake up at 3 AM and start something just to get the timer running. Mercifully, unlike actual video games, automating this isn't cheating.

The existence of timer resets also incentivizes us to spend our usage as quickly as possible. No way to know when Tibo's gonna push his reset button. Ideally, we want to be at zero percent remaining when he does. Any usage left before reset is usage that was left on the table. The new 5h limits will make this much more difficult, and this is probably by design.

Heh, it's just like my mobile gaming days... Deal with this long enough and eventually you can see the game mechanics like Neo sees the Matrix. Never thought I'd fall into this rabbit hole again.

I disagree about the "what did they build" angle though. These subscriptions are providing me with truly absurd amounts of value. Gacha games deserve to be mercilessly botted to death, but AI is world changing technology.

arational

6 hours ago

Considering the model was trained both on coding and addition design, it therefore follows that the coding harness design may inherit some addiction bit. This could be an emergent issue, or just a pure coincidence.

frisbee6152

6 hours ago

I’ve switched to a higher tier plan where I don’t hit limits and have found it less habit forming and more pleasant. I’m not going to hit the limit anyway, so there’s less reason to alter my behavior to match quotas.

The end result is that I’m considerably under quota every week, so I’m sure margins are comfortable for OpenAI. But it means my work doesn’t get interrupted, and I can use heavier models and fast mode liberally, because I’m not going to hit quota anyway, which means my sessions are shorter and more productive.

It’s hard to get anything “done done” when you get a quota limit, just as you’re getting into a good flow.

matheusmoreira

4 hours ago

> I've switched to a higher tier plan where I don’t hit limits and have found it less habit forming and more pleasant.

It's the opposite for me. The more money I pay, the more pressured I feel to squeeze out every last percent of usage out of the subscription. I can only know peace when the meter is at 0% remaining.

God help me if the OpenAI guys announce an incoming reset. If it's not going fast enough I'll just find new things for the AI to do, usually a massive parallel code review. They can always reset without any warning too, they did it after breaking the news this thread is about. Slept with an empty tank and woke up with a full tank. Wish my car worked this way.

At least I'm actually doing things instead of procrastinating.

svachalek

8 hours ago

It's a little more like App Store "gems" imo, with some clarity and honesty removed. Pay for "usage" that disappears arbitrarily: coded that bug fix for you, 3% usage consumed. Would you like to upgrade your plan to pro for "more" usage or max for "much more" usage? Buy pro max for "most" usage and access to our latest model, until we revoke it 15 minutes from now.

matheusmoreira

4 hours ago

Yeah, it's a lot like that.

I've been running statistics on my local codex transcripts in order to try and figure out how many API credits are included in the subscription. So far my results are hovering around 3k credits for Plus and 15k credits for Pro 5x, which is aligned with what they advertise.

algoth1

9 hours ago

When there’s billions involved everything is intentional

matheusmoreira

8 hours ago

It's the gacha of software development.

palmotea

9 hours ago

>> During this period, the company also reset users’ weekly usage early on several occasions to celebrate milestones, including adding another million active users across the two (now unified) platforms.

> Such a casino vibe.

No no no! It means we're all in it together! Feel the parasocial vibes!

tom1337

10 hours ago

also it sounds like users benefit but they mostly don't. resets mostly benefitted OpenAI and only gave users few additionals hours.

bko

9 hours ago

I think it's great that oai resets users limits. What is this complaint?

Free drinks? Keep customers happy? Reward your heaviest users? Casino vibes

venzaspa

8 hours ago

I used to think it was pretty great but now it just means you can't plan your usage across the week.

It's a slightly entitled complaint but when you 'waste' 80% of your remaining usage because you get a reset you weren't expecting, there's a ping of disappointment there.

bko

7 hours ago

If you don't like it just ignore it. You're just trying to game the system and extract the absolute most you can and you're upset that this thwarts your game and doesn't benefit you. People like you are why we can't have nice things

wccrawford

8 hours ago

I've seen a lot of people who seem to think it's inevitable that they'll get resets, making them more likely to over-spend early because they'll get a reset anyhow.

It could leave them out of availability later when they need it.

vatsachak

9 hours ago

I think there can be many complaints about large scale AI providers but given that large companies are now pushing for local models it seems that we are luckily avoiding the situation where AI is a utility

jchw

9 hours ago

Well, you know what they say. The first one's free.

bko

7 hours ago

When did hn turn into reddit?

jchw

7 hours ago

See the note at the bottom here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

qsort

9 hours ago

They now give out resets you can choose when to use, but with a "best before" date. With Anthropic you don't even know what model you'll have access to next week. A few months ago I wanted to try a subscription to Gemini but I couldn't figure out how to give them money. The other one thinks he's Mecha Hitler.

To an extent I get it, this is not like a normal SaaS where you just buy seats, but their commercial offerings, especially B2C ones, feel like complete amateur hour. If they were selling literally anything else I'd have ran for the hills a long time ago.

bpodgursky

9 hours ago

The vibe was people goofing around on Twitter. There's one guy making the call and the reset is kind of a meme.

mannanj

9 hours ago

Yeah. I switched to codex 1.5 months ago to try it, and for some reason the "vibe" kept me here. It was really the unpredictable rewards from the constant resets though. I am not convinced it's a better product or that sol + any combination of luna is better than Claude.

I'll be switching back.

fau

10 hours ago

> This is necessary as (a) the 5h limit allows us to smoothen the load on our compute, allowing to keep the plan generous in terms of weekly usage

Seems fair, but then maybe the 5h usage should also drain slower during off-peak hours? Perhaps it already does.

> and (b) users on the Plus plan are relatively casual and new users, but then also just accidentally eat through their whole weeks usage and then are confused, making it not a great experience.

Wouldn't this one be fixed by making the 5h limit a guardrail you can opt out of? If so, then this doesn't work as justification for a mandatory limit.

bootlooped

10 hours ago

Also, I want to be able to eat through my whole week's usage at once. What if I was busy all week and want to work on my personal project(s) Saturday or Sunday.

dcrazy

8 hours ago

That is a pathological use case for OpenAI, and precisely why they have instituted these limits. Part of the tradeoff of doing your work on someone else’s computer is they get to set the rules about when you use it.

watwut

8 hours ago

How is that pathological? It sounds like a completely normal behavior.

ssl-3

7 hours ago

What was described is not pathological. It doesn't involve disease or a disturbed mental state. No part is paradoxical, counterintuitive, or involves unexpected results.

Nothing shows that it is other than normal and healthy behavior that is produced from within a rational mental state. The complaint about scheduling is also normal and rational.

The closest thing to "pathological" that I'm seeing here in these comments is trendy misuse of the term.

dcrazy

8 hours ago

It is pathological for their utilization, as in “worst-case behavior.” Like how a program that makes and frees millions of differently-sized heap allocations is pathological for memory fragmentation.

GolfPopper

8 hours ago

It feels like daily quests in MMOs, trying to force user engagement via cultivating addiction-style behavior patterns

svachalek

8 hours ago

Come back tomorrow so you can raise your faction reputations another 0.00001%!

cactusplant7374

10 hours ago

There are no off-peak hours. I have received the model overloaded error that cancels my current goal during the early hours of the morning.

out_of_protocol

10 hours ago

> early hours of the morning

which TZ?

> There are no off-peak hours.

Probably US west coast hours, but there's no public stats

user

9 hours ago

[deleted]

cactusplant7374

9 hours ago

2AM CST

mbreese

9 hours ago

I’ve been hit with limits at 4am Eastern time when I’d expect for not a lot to be going on. I always thought the quotas would be used best for shaping demand curves, but as you said — there are no off-peak hours anymore.

LaurensBER

10 hours ago

Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan this effectively introduces the 5h limits again for all corporate users.

At this point the 40 USD/120 USD Cursor Team subscription suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. You'll get more generous limits and a single monthly limit.

evandena

10 hours ago

Premium seats are coming soon.

https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/

trollbridge

10 hours ago

Based on the ads flooding me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and anywhere else I see ads, Cursor is really going after this market right now.

stavros

10 hours ago

I'm curious about why you see ads, I didn't think anyone on HN does, nowadays. Given how easy it is to install uBlock, is it a conscious decision to browse adfully?

trollbridge

4 hours ago

The rare instance I see them is when needing to use the actual Facebook phone app, and then I see the ads targeted at me. Basically wall to wall ads for Cursor, Anthropic, and Littlebird.

walthamstow

10 hours ago

I don't think that many people here voluntarily go on Facebook either

dgellow

10 hours ago

I’m still shocked to hear that people go on LinkedIn

phyzome

10 hours ago

LinkedIn has a couple of useful features: Getting in touch with former coworkers; seeing who might know the hiring manager for a position you're applying for; uh... that's about it.

The rest is garbage but I guess is how they make their money.

red-iron-pine

7 hours ago

update it once a year with the resume. sometimes a mid-year connect to coworkers or respond to someone I know who poked me.

more than once a quarter? nah. would also delete it if I could

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

emkoko

10 hours ago

yeah do yall go on linkedin for anything legitimate??

oldmanhorton

8 hours ago

Some of us don’t use an adblocker because we are aware that ads are how most websites get paid for on the internet. I pay for sites I care to support, but for something like LinkedIn, I’d rather have their monetization scheme push me away from any usage than block the ads and make the site slightly more palatable.

stavros

8 hours ago

No, ads mean the customer is the advertiser, not me, the user, and align the business' interest with the advertiser's, against my own.

I'd rather the site asked me to pay directly, or not at all. I will not see any ads I can avoid.

rob

10 hours ago

Why not? I owe my life to ads. Thank you Google AdSense and Yahoo! Ads for the hundreds of thousands of dollars you paid for 16 year old Rob to slap them on his MySpace layout website in 2006 so Timmy could put a glitter graphic of Stone Cold Steve Austin on his banner.

rob

10 hours ago

> Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan

https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/

flimflamm

10 hours ago

So we must move to 5 hour working days. Thanks OpenAI!

pzo

9 hours ago

probably less - I sometimes manage to burn like most of my 5h credits on Claude 5x Max plan in 2h.

The annoying things is that you gave bigger tasks and is such session finished maybe 70% and after 5h pool resets cache will expire so that if you "please continue" it will wipe out again a lot of your 5h pool)

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

cute_boi

9 hours ago

Lets normalize working 5 hours a day. :)

OsrsNeedsf2P

11 hours ago

https://codex-resets.com/

rfgplk

8 hours ago

The reset cadence is absurd.

LetMeLogin

10 hours ago

I really don't mind blowing my weekly usage in one day, but getting my tasks stopped and waiting for 5h cap to finish - is just annoying.

benmorris

9 hours ago

This sucks, but really the value of the $20 plan has been insane. I routinely get weeks of work out of the weekly limit, so yeah I'll just move up plans if needed.

harrisoned

9 hours ago

It will get worse!

Tighter limits, forcing people to higher plans. Most will go as they are addicted and dependent on those tools. They need to use to finish the project they started as no human will touch that pile of code. If you didn't saw this coming, as it has been the standard business strategy from all kinds of SaaS in the last years, you haven't been paying attention.

Gareth321

9 hours ago

There are solid, cheap options like xAI, z.AI, MiniMax, Kimi, DeepSeek, and Alibaba. Heck, I can run a coding agent on my 32GB MacBook Pro M1 right now and it's actually pretty good (just slow). No one is forced to keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic. That's their major strategic risk: distilled models are far cheaper to build and run and they're only a few months behind.

hemkeshr

8 hours ago

Imagine being a student and using codex for some night studies and hit the limit at the wrong time saying let's continue after exams, still we have normal chat available. Maybe for projects also but we still have no limits in normal chat section but that ain't codex for working on our projects.

danielpassy

10 hours ago

This is such a bummer for those of us living in third world countries. I’m not a casual user, I just can’t afford to pay more.

estebarb

10 hours ago

Personally I have been using Deepseek V4 flash and it is enough for my needs. You can use OpenCode Zen/Go and also get access to many other models, including OpenAI ones. Writing purpose specific agents can make cheaper models close the intelligence gap with the most expensive ones

dgellow

10 hours ago

Aren’t you better using other services than OpenAI if the price matters to you?

danielpassy

10 hours ago

I’ve tried Claude Code and recently switched to Codex. I’ve found that $20 on Codex gets me 4–5 times more usage than on Claude Code.

I could burn through my Opus usage in 1 hour whereas with Sol, I can go 3–4 days.

F7F7F7

10 hours ago

Oolama? That plan is more than generous for $20.

LUmBULtERA

10 hours ago

How is that the case? ChatGPT not only gives a lot of Codex/Agentic usage, once you've run out of that you still have a massive quota of Chat usage that's entirely separate. You can still use plug-ins with Github, Google Drive, etc... using the Chat usage as well.

benjiro29

8 hours ago

From my experience:

* OpenAI was ~$170 per week in value

* Claude was around $500 per week in value.

* Ollama Cloud is giving me about ~$160 per week in value.

So right now (thing constantly change in the AI world), its not more generous then Claude.

usef-

10 hours ago

You might be thinking of API pricing? The subscriptions give you a lot.

dgellow

10 hours ago

Oh right, thanks for catching that

ReptileMan

9 hours ago

There are many providers and harnesses. You could go almost 90% of the frontier models for the fraction of the price. You have 3 more free days of ox alpha.

Geofencing has been quite good at creating feeling of being ripped off in the developed countries - from which the bulk of the companies revenue come from - that companies seems to be dropping it lately.

Anyway - China's advances seems to have caught the big 2 unprepared, so price war seems to be going on.

And there are Chinese resellers for frontier models if you are desperate for high end frontier tokens.

datakan

10 hours ago

I left Claude because of this. I guess now I need to move on from OpenAI also

wobbat

9 hours ago

But where will you go?

rrr_oh_man

9 hours ago

I really don’t get why people use the native chat apps when you can use all models via their APIs with no restrictions.

It’s more expensive, yes, but I assume most people here use it for something that is worth spending money on?

vecter

9 hours ago

From my rough understanding, tokens are about five to ten times more expensive than the prepaid plans

rrr_oh_man

8 hours ago

I get that it’s not nothing, but from personal experience it makes me just so much faster.

I’m basically replicating myself multiple times for a ~10% salary surcharge.

In my mind it’s impossible to not see it that way, unless you just want to capture the subsidy surplus for free.

joshstrange

7 hours ago

In the last 30 days my LLM spend, if paid at API rates, would be $19,431 (and that doesn't track online chats or my Github Action reviews). Now I wish I was making $200K/mo but I'm not, no where close. I got all that for $220 on subscriptions.

Yes, LLMs are awesome and let me do things faster but I would be using them far less if my only option was the API. I used coding agents prior to subscriptions (Aider) and spent <$200 total before abandoning it due to cost. The results were good, but not worth the price for me.

rrr_oh_man

5 hours ago

May I ask what you’re doing?

joshstrange

5 hours ago

Writing code for my day job and my side business. 90% of its planning/writing/reviewing code and little bit of it's admin-type work. I have two products/services I do on the side, food festival payments/management software and food week (Burger Week, Pizza Week, etc) management software. My side projects, while profitable, where always behind where I wanted them to be but now I can finally chew into the backlog of things I've wanted for years.

I'm happy to answer more questions if that doesn't cover what you were looking for. I'm not sure if "coding" is all you wanted or if you wanted more details.

rrr_oh_man

4 hours ago

So interesting, thank you!!

What would you say is the split of your token use (between main job / side project)? Do you use agents for everything?

I'm asking because I feel I'm weird in my usage, which is very much structured like 1. organising the context and then 2. send off requests to 1-2 models and continue down the rabbit hole from there. I've found agents take longer and make me learn/retain less about the system I'm building.

dcrazy

8 hours ago

It seems you’ve stumbled into the truth: a lot of things are only worth throwing LLMs at as long as the LLMs are cheap.

ok123456

8 hours ago

Chinese models.

F7F7F7

10 hours ago

I see this as evidence that last weeks token burn rate wasn’t by accident or due to some “bug.”

I don’t mind the 5 hour window but this is a reminder to not hinge your workflows on any one tool.

dgellow

10 hours ago

I’m not a user myself but find it not great for your customers to announce such a change for the next day. Cannot they announce a few days in advance?

Alifatisk

8 hours ago

Maybe I should go back to ChatGPT again and copy-paste code.

mostertoaster

9 hours ago

Is there a world where we look back at how AI usage is charged today and we equate it with how we had minutes on AOL and how absurd it seems looking back?

sidrag22

8 hours ago

I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.

However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.

rfgplk

7 hours ago

Absolutely. LLM providers are likely to be the next telecom providers. Low and steady income, translating to safe dividend income for investors. Most of these companies have no moat, since most LLM implementation strategies more or less converge to the same result.

y1n0

9 hours ago

Not when you consider the sheer amount of compute to calculate a single token. Today, at least.

Maybe if we have some breakthrough in how to get equivalent ai capacity out of less compute it’ll seem crazy in retrospect.

But the magnitude of flops per token on SOTA models is mind boggling huge.

dcrazy

8 hours ago

AOL minutes seem antiquated, but not absurd.

joshstrange

7 hours ago

Absolutely. Tokens will flow like electricity, in the instances when you aren't just paying for electricity to run models locally. The token providers (well, at least the frontier labs) will fight it tooth-and-nail with the example of telecoms being "how to become a commodity" but as long as open models continue they will have no choice.

Any other outcome would be pretty terrible.

AlwaysRock

8 hours ago

Eventually.

rrr_oh_man

9 hours ago

Stupid question: Why are y'all not using the API? It’s more expensive, but you can do what you want.

emehex

9 hours ago

> It's more expensive

There's your answer

rrr_oh_man

9 hours ago

Man, that was my instinct too, but I’m not sure.

I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?

If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.

Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.

phiresky

9 hours ago

I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.

At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.

I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.

[1]: https://tibotattle.com/

rfgplk

7 hours ago

> API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience),

More. On CC I'm currently burning ~$5k a day (according to claudes own metrics) and I use up the weekly quota in about 3-4 days. Meaning I'm eating $20k worth of tokens for a $200 sub.

Current session I have running in the background, spinning up tests mostly

Total cost: $660.33

  Total duration (API):  22h 36m 33s


  Total duration (wall): 8h 33m 58s


  Total code changes:    7662 lines added, 177 lines removed


  Usage by model:
      claude-haiku-4-5:  6.0k input, 38 output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write ($0.0062)


         claude-opus-5:  322.9k input, 5.1m output, 702.9m cache read, 19.3m cache write ($606.64)


       claude-opus-4-8:  742 input, 883.5k output, 38.6m cache read, 2.0m cache write ($53.68)

rrr_oh_man

6 hours ago

What are you doing with this, if I may ask?

rrr_oh_man

8 hours ago

Thank you.

> At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.

Could you elaborate on that?

Off topic: You did the ISBN visualization thing! Awesome!