> Usage limits [...] Winner right now is Codex by a mile
This hasn't been the case since around July. If you measure usage in raw api costs, Anthropic is actually giving more on $200 than OpenAI now. This includes resets. Usage allocation difference would be humiliating for codex subs were it not for resets. But fixing usage limits with resets is ugly, and they're not good for your mental well-being.
> Context window in the harness
Codex now allows 1M for subs with config params. But generally speaking, you shouldn't really be using 1M context. If you accidentally send a request with say, ~700k context already accumulated in a session which is outside cache TTL, you're paying full cost of these 700k tokens.
> I've subscription hopped a bunch
OpenAI actually has a new strategy to prevent subscription hopping after their 2-3 month-long marketing push to get claude-folks to switch over:
you can't buy a $200 sub anymore. So if you cancel, you won't be able to get back in. Hostage situation, essentially.
EDIT: re: usage limits, oh-my-pi maintainer has been tracking this - https://nitter.xitter.cc/_can1357/status/2090075496948060372
I’ve been a Claude user, switched to Codex expecting usage limits to be more loose but I can’t even get through a basic sysadmin task on the $20 plan using Sol medium before I hit the 5hr one.
I think I’m gonna move back to a Claude plan. I could barely hit the $200 limit if I went non-stop on programming tasks.
I think OpenAI essentially executed a bait-and-switch here, and they've lost a lot of goodwill with me, like Anthropic did, before them.
When they started the aggressive campaign, entire X (including myself, sadly) was full of posts about how "unlimited" codex usage is even on a $20 plan. Sam Altman was posting something in line of "we love our users, unlike Anthropic". Got my network to get codex subs because of the value compared to claude.
Then they gradually reduced the limits to the point where even $200 plan only lasts you just 1-2 days and $20 is basically unusable, then the hostage thing.
I remember Tibo Sottiaux telling people on X how OI doesn't believe in 5 hour limit just a day or two before OI adopted it.
tbf that's only for the pro plan, not the two max plans
I do the bulk of work on Sol Medium/Low and don't have that experience on the $20 plan. If you said Astra I'd agree it's easy to burn through the 5 hours even on the lower reasoning levels.
Do you have /fast enabled by any chance?
I don’t think so, I’ve seen it suggest I try it. I’ll double check when I get home though.
I was considering the $100 plan, but I hit the 5hr limit in an hour. So even with the $100 plan I figured I cant go non-stop on a single agent running Sol Medium
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but I am pretty sure the $100 plan doesn’t have a 5hr usage limit. So, if that was what was preventing you from going non-stop, it might be worth it.
I am considering the plan myself. I just don’t know if I want to fork out $100 per month for something I will make $0 off of.
similar here: I tried Codex $20/mo on a trial and I ran out of 5hr usage mid way through a medium complexity task on a medium size model twice and gave up there. I don’t recall the equiv Claude plan being anything like that. Anecdata, but not great for OAI if they actually want to retain people on a trial.
You don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan. You get Sol on equivalent Codex plan.
You meant Astra, not Sol, I think. But Opus 5.5 is slightly better than Fable and Astra now.
Astra is barely usable even on the $100 plan. And that is if it doesn't just burn through 80% of your weekly quota in a couple of hours by continually expanding the scope of the task you gave it - while not noticing the failing tests that are right in front of it.
Opus is at least actually usable even on the small plan. The main downside is its insane writing style, but 5.5 seems to address that somewhat. Otherwise, you can just use your $20 OpenAI plan to have Luna de-slop Opus' prose, which seems to work fine.
I have a Claude Code hook that calls codex for a code review on commit time (Codex is set to Astra Medium) and it's been pretty good in general. It sometimes hits the 5hr limit but most of the time it provides really good feedback and because it's a completely different model it's mostly complementary to what Fable/Opus do themselves. IMHO it's been $20 well spent.
...but the few times I've tried to use codex for a moderately difficult task it burned through its limit extremely quickly.
But you don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan, then why compare it Sol on Codex 20 USD?
Sol is their middle model. Luna is smallest. And Astra is big, their Fable equivalent.
My code review benchmark put Sol 5.6 on the same performance tier as Fable 5.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-...
I've run into hitting limits on the personal plan perhaps twice since the beginning of the year. But also I don't use the personal plan for coding tasks between 7am-noon M-F.
Anthropic has a separate meter for Fable. I used to get like five Fable sessions per week and that's it.
OpenAI has no such nonsense. No separate meter. No five hour limits. I get to use Astra at max effort on literally every task if I want to, and even this somehow lasts me several days.
Anthropic got caught playing stupid "20x refers to the 5h limit" word games with their customers. Meanwhile, I have statistically verified that OpenAI Pro 20x = 4 * Pro 5x = 20 * Plus, exactly as advertised.
I quantified cybersecurity lockouts on my code review benchmark and they were significantly lower on OpenAI:
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-...
My benchmark also suggests even OpenAI's Sol models can match Fable performance at a fraction of the cost.
OpenAI also used to have a ton of very nice features: unlimited chat separate from codex, allowing turns to finish even at 0% usage remaining. Sadly these got removed after abuse.
As a former Anthropic customer, OpenAI is simply the better company. There is no way around it. Good place to be while the chinese open weights models catch up. Claude is good but it doesn't make up for Anthropic's shenanigans.
To add my anecdote, while the Codex subscription appears to get you much fewer tokens as measured by cost, I find the amount of actual useful work that can be done by both subs to be about equal. Codex seems much less prone to burning millions of tokens just reading the codebase and doing nothing useful. That also makes it much quicker. Plus it actually does what I tell it with few mistakes first time, so less rework needed.
The Claude TUI is just so much better though so I'm hoping Opus 5.5 is actually good and not just benchmaxxed.
I'm not sure the tokens can be compared like that between OpenAI/Anthropic.
When i swapped between a 200k Fable context into an Astra model (i was out of fable) the token usage in that context dropped to 150k or something.
Either there was a bug somewhere, or the same text got cut up very differently between providers.
That 50k was almost certainly accumulated encrypted reasoning tokens that would have been unreadable by astra.
Given that Anthropic models are very verbose and OpenAI models can be very concise, wouldn't a count of expected task completions be a better measurement than raw API costs?
Perhaps. But Sol/Astra also likes dumping pages of jargon-packed content at me, so I'm not sure it's that much different. I actually still prefer the way Fable talks to me, even considering the horrible claudisms.
But even if we leave that aside, OpenAI models are also much more eager than Anthropic, which are on the lazier side. Left unsupervised, Sol/Astra will attempt to build a sha256 verified rocket ship if you ask them to fix a race condition in your to-do list app. Anthropic models will do what you asked for, maybe even forget to implement parts of that ask, but they won't generally throw a slop granade at you.
I can leave Fable orchestrator unsupervised for ~2h. Leaving Sol/Astra unsupervised for ~2h means the next user turn will contain a message: "what are you doing and why?".
Do you have a source on the first note? I switched away from Claude around July because of how bad the usage limits were, and Codex gave me easily double the amount of usage per task completed. Would be interested to see if that's no longer the case.
Added link in edit. OMP maintainer has several claude and codex subs and he's been tracking usage since around July.
I haven't been tracking, but this roughly matches my experience with codex 20x and claude 20x subs. Claude subscription now lasts me 3-3.5 days on average. Codex is 2-2.5 days. This is work on same projects, with similarly sized tasks.
To make matters worse, I've merged a lot more code produced by fable than sol/astra.
I think the problem with Anthropic's plan is that Fable just destroys it. If you stick to Opus and below, the $200 plan goes from "using 50% of the weekly quota on the first day" to something much more reasonable.
> you can't buy a $200 sub anymore
Are you sure?
Yes.
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2098113585683808624
That is an old tweet. They since reenabled it. I know because I was on the $200/month plan and couldn't resub once it expired. However, a couple days ago it finally let me resub again.
Now, if they disabled it yet again, that's another story. But that tweet is not evidence of that.
I have been attempting to get on the $200 sub for a while. It was not available for me a few days ago, and checking again now, it is still not available.
That's too bad. I wonder why I was able to get it after days of not being able to. They must've just temporarily enabled it again. Probably worth checking a few times a day to see if it reappears.
Though with the price of GPT-6 Luna, the temptation to switch to pay-per-token grows.
There was/is a loophole where if you signed up via the iOS or Android app, it allowed it.
It's been disabled for some time now though otherwise, I check about once a day myself and keep and eye out on social media.
Annoying since I was about to upgrade back to the $200 plan after downgrading to the $100 plan due to being on leave and not needing as much usage the month prior. Doh.
You can resub on that plan if you've been on it before. They aren't taking new subs on that plan for the time being.
I think what they did was allow resubs for users who already had $200 sub before.
Just checked my toy chatgpt account that only ever had a $20 sub. $200 plan still shows "The 20X plan is temporarily unavailable for purchase".