Codex Pricing Comparisons

I don’t mind paying $200 a month for Codex if it helps me build faster. But when I need more usage, buying more should be simple.

Add credits to my account and keep working. That sounds reasonable until I compare what those credits buy with what I get from the subscription.

Then I’m wondering whether another subscription would be a better deal. Which means another account, another login, and another bill to manage just to use the same tool. Then there’s keeping my Codex settings consistent and making sure it has the project context it needs when I switch accounts.

I just want to keep working on my projects. Why does buying more usage need to be this complicated?

What Codex Costs

Codex is included with ChatGPT plans. Here are the main paid individual options as of September 11, 2026:

Going from $100 to $200 gets you four times the published usage allowance for twice the price. If you use Codex heavily, that’s a pretty good reason to pick the $200 plan.

Credits work differently. The subscription gives you an allowance that resets. Credits are a balance you spend after that allowance runs out. A $200 subscription and $200 in credits don’t buy the same thing. OpenAI explains the pricing here.

Why I Question the Value of Credits

I’ve written about why AI is the best co-founder I’ve had. It lets me do more on my own, which is why I’m willing to pay for it. What I want to know is how much the work I actually finish on Pro would cost in credits.

Other developers are asking the same question. Quesma’s Jacek Migdal reported spending $270 in Business overflow on one pull request within 24 hours. He said teammates were doing comparable work daily on Pro 20x. Fast mode added to his bill, so I wouldn’t expect everyone to see the same difference. Still, that’s a lot to spend on one PR when the subscription is $200 for the month.

Take a simple example. If I need $50 in extra usage once in a while, buying credits seems reasonable. But if extra work costs $500 in credits every month and could fit within another $200 subscription, why would I choose the credits?

That example assumes the second plan covers the extra work. You’d need to compare actual usage to know. But it explains why adding credits is a hard sell for someone using Codex every day.

What Would $200 of Pro Usage Cost in Credits?

There isn’t a fixed dollar answer because Pro doesn’t include a fixed number of tokens. It depends on how much work you get done, which model you use, and how much of the input is cached. But we can put numbers to an example.

Suppose a month of work fits within your $200 Pro plan and uses the amounts below on Astra in Standard mode. This is an example, not a measurement of my usage or a promised Pro allowance.

For the credit price, assume $200 buys 5,000 credits, or $0.04 each. Check your own checkout price; this is an assumption for the calculation, not a verified offer for every account. The token rates come from OpenAI’s published pricing.

In that example, $200 on Pro covers work that would cost $630 in purchased credits. That’s $430 more to pay for the same work through credits, or 3.15 times the subscription price. The $630 is the value of credits consumed; your checkout may sell packs that require buying more than that.

If you then wanted to repeat that same amount of work after using up your included allowance, the extra credits would cost another $630 at these rates. Your total would be $830: the $200 subscription plus $630 in extra usage.

The missing piece is how many tokens your subscription actually covers in a normal month. Until that is measured, $630 is an illustration, not the value of everyone’s Pro plan. Still, this is the comparison I want OpenAI to make easy to see: what did my subscription cover, and what would that same work cost after I hit the limit?

I Don’t Want to Manage More Accounts

Even if another subscription saves money, I don’t want to juggle accounts to get that value.

Which account was I using for this project? Which one has usage left? Am I about to hit a limit again?

Those are annoying things to think about when I’m trying to finish something. I want to open my project and pick up where I left off.

I’d rather pay for more usage on the account I already have. That should be the easiest option. It’s the kind of friction I wrote about in Founders, Open Your App: the small hassles you notice when you use a product every day.

Now the $200 Plan Is Paused

On September 10, Thibault Sottiaux announced that OpenAI was pausing new $200 Pro subscriptions because of the demand for Astra.

“There is no impact to existing accounts and we are working on adding more capacity as fast as we can.”

— Thibault Sottiaux (@thsottiaux) September 10, 2026

Existing $200 subscriptions still renew. The $100 plan is still available. But new sign-ups and upgrades to $200 are paused, according to OpenAI’s Help Center.

So the $200 plan hasn’t been removed for existing subscribers, but you can’t buy another one right now. That makes the question of how to get more usage even more frustrating.

I understand they need enough capacity to serve the people already paying. I hope that as they add capacity, they also make it easier to buy more usage.

Let Me Upgrade the Account I Have

I’d be interested in a $400 or $600 plan if the usage made it worth the price. Those plans aren’t currently advertised. They’re options I’d like to see.

Tell me what I get, show me how it compares with my recent usage, and let me decide. If credits are the option, help me understand how far they’ll go and let me set a spending limit.

Codex has already helped me migrate this blog from WordPress to Astro. I want to keep using it to build things. I just want a reasonable way to pay for more of it without managing more accounts.