Is this not just about extra credit? So what's included in the subscription doesn't change - just extra credits are now token based instead of message based? (For Plus/Pro)
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.
The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers.
The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.
> Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks.
Nope, they buried the lead a bit but this is coming for _all_ users, even pro/plus subscription plans. So you get chatgpt pro/plus benefits, and then effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex
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?
Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.
Hard to say, but GitHub Copilot also allows access to Anthropic, Google and Grok models, so I don't know that a change from a single provider would necessarily change how they bill
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.
What has actually changed? It's unclear how much can you do right now, unless they've already switched you to the new plan and you're speaking from experience.
We are exiting a hype cycle, well into the adoption curve. Subscriptions were never going to last.
My next step is going to be evaluating open and local models to see if they are sufficiently close to par with frontier models.
My hope is that the end of seat based pricing comes with this tech cycle. I was looking for document signing provider that doesn't charge a monthly, I only need a few docs a year.
Although I have to say I am sometimes surprised how much people burn through their usage. I was briefly on a Claude Max plan and then switched to a pro plan and still almost never hit my limit.
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.
Literally every VC funded consumer product has switched from a "growth at all costs" phase to a "Now we hike prices, make money, and generally enshittify" phase, and tons of those companies are still around (e.g. Uber), so I'm not sure why anyone thinks it would be much different for AI.
Billions of USD in debt, a business model bleeding cash with no profit in perspective, high-competition environnement, a sub-par product, free-to-use offline models taking off, potential regulatory issues, some investor commitments pulling out... tricky.
But let's not cry for the founders, they managed to get away with tons of money. The problem is for the fools holding the bag.
Yeah you guys have to pay attention to the state of the overall economy. We are in the credit-crunch phase of a recession. The funny money has ran out and infinite loans are no longer available. These companies have to find way to pay their debt now
In my Codex dashboard, I can buy 1000 extra credits for $40. The credit cost for GPT-5.4 is 375 credits / 1M output tokens which translates to $15 / 1M output tokens which exactly equals the API rate.
There basically the same. Codex is better at some things, Claude is better at other things. It’s honestly a wash, just pick the one that gives you a warmer fuzzy feeling in your tummy.
5.4 is great. I use it for python professionally and for typescript/front-end games and educational apps recreationally. In my experience it's roughly as good as opus, just a lot cheaper. It's amazing how much usage you get for $20/mo
this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.
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 don't think there has been any exponential in terms on inference costs in the last couple of years. In fact, they have worsened as the same relevant hardware is more expensive and so is energy - and to top it off, to stay SotA companies are using larger models with higher running costs. But for some reason people are conflating the improvements in models with the cost of inference.
What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.
This pricing only really makes sense if the users can predict their usage, if not people that use this heavily are just going to be hamstrung and are going to start rationing their usage.
What if the goal was to draw us away from building our own AI data centers with their cheaper prices then eventually make us pay up for the difference?
from what they wrote, they're just changing how they measure the usage; might even be a good thing if you manage your context right:
> This format replaces average per-message estimates for your plan with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It is most useful when you want a clearer view of how input, cached input, and output affect credit consumption.
The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.
Does this mean there’s no such thing as a “subscription” to ChatGPT for businesses? I thought they offered businesses a subscription with some amount of built in quota previously, including for the side products like codex and sora.
There are still subscriptions that give access to both ChatGPT and Codex, but with a much smaller usage quota than before the change (which came at the same time as the end of the 2x promo). I couldn't find the equivalent in terms of credit for the usage included with these $20/25 seats...
If you use Google's tooling but not if you need API access. API access is not in the subscriptions and uses token based pricing. For development I find that the Gemini IDE plugins that have good free usage and are included in the subscriptions aren't great. Gemini plug-in under IntelliJ is often broken, etc. The best experience is with other tools like Cline where you've had to use a developer based account which is API usage based already.
But Gemini's API based usage also has a free tier and if that doesn't work for you (they train on your data) and you've never signed up before you get several hundred dollars in free credits that expire after 90 days. 3 months of free access is a pretty good deal.
For home projects, I almost exclusively use the web chat interface to code. I haven't done anything large yet so I will iterate and get the web chat to update code, print out the code that I copy and paste.
How does this differ in terms of pricing than Codex?
Token-based usage accounting is more accurate and therefore more sustainable than message-count-based usage accounting. It should've been this way to begin with.
Is this not just about extra credit? So what's included in the subscription doesn't change - just extra credits are now token based instead of message based? (For Plus/Pro)
God every single title I read about AI on this site ends up being a straight up lie.
Yes.
> This format replaces average per-message estimates with a direct mapping between token usage and credits.
It's to replace the opaque, per-message calculation, not the subscription plan.
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.
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
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.
Pay 100 Gold or 15 Gems to generate this feature
Taximeter effect
What is snarky about that?
The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers.
Is there anything wrong with that?
The title is misleading and not in the article. This change is for business/enterprise accounts. Also, these are still credit based. The change is that credits now operate on tokens like the API rather than on messages as they used to.
> Customers on existing Plus, Pro and Enterprise/Edu plans should continue to use the legacy rate card. We’ll migrate you to the new rates in the upcoming weeks.
Nope, they buried the lead a bit but this is coming for _all_ users, even pro/plus subscription plans. So you get chatgpt pro/plus benefits, and then effectively $20/$200 in credits for codex
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?
Is this something that is likely to also change the way Github Copilot bills? Right now the billing is message-based, not token-based. And OpenAI and Microsoft are rather opaquely intertwined in the AI space.
Hard to say, but GitHub Copilot also allows access to Anthropic, Google and Grok models, so I don't know that a change from a single provider would necessarily change how they bill
For the past month, I've been claiming that $20/mo codex is the best deal in AI.
Now I'm going to have to find the new best deal.
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.
Already paying for Google photo storage, AI pro for an extra $7 is a steal with anti-gravity.
GH Copilot is still the best deal, while it lasts
What has actually changed? It's unclear how much can you do right now, unless they've already switched you to the new plan and you're speaking from experience.
We are exiting a hype cycle, well into the adoption curve. Subscriptions were never going to last.
My next step is going to be evaluating open and local models to see if they are sufficiently close to par with frontier models.
My hope is that the end of seat based pricing comes with this tech cycle. I was looking for document signing provider that doesn't charge a monthly, I only need a few docs a year.
The days of subsidized access is rapidly coming to an end.
Although I have to say I am sometimes surprised how much people burn through their usage. I was briefly on a Claude Max plan and then switched to a pro plan and still almost never hit my limit.
So many folks are just burning tokens just to burn them.
The infrastructure build out just can't keep up with it.
It’s Joever.
Good!
subsidies always lead to waste.
Sounds like a death knell to me.
If I recall correctly, Ed Zitron noted in a recent article that one of the horsemen of his AI-pocalypse would be price hikes from providers.
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.
That guy has his own form of AI psychosis
Literally every VC funded consumer product has switched from a "growth at all costs" phase to a "Now we hike prices, make money, and generally enshittify" phase, and tons of those companies are still around (e.g. Uber), so I'm not sure why anyone thinks it would be much different for AI.
Things must be bad if they're doing this before their IPO
Billions of USD in debt, a business model bleeding cash with no profit in perspective, high-competition environnement, a sub-par product, free-to-use offline models taking off, potential regulatory issues, some investor commitments pulling out... tricky.
But let's not cry for the founders, they managed to get away with tons of money. The problem is for the fools holding the bag.
Yeah you guys have to pay attention to the state of the overall economy. We are in the credit-crunch phase of a recession. The funny money has ran out and infinite loans are no longer available. These companies have to find way to pay their debt now
In my Codex dashboard, I can buy 1000 extra credits for $40. The credit cost for GPT-5.4 is 375 credits / 1M output tokens which translates to $15 / 1M output tokens which exactly equals the API rate.
Any takes on how Codex compares to Claude? I mostly use it to run ahead, document, investigate and prep the actual implementation for Claude.
Gemini burned me too many times but maybe the situation has improved since.
There basically the same. Codex is better at some things, Claude is better at other things. It’s honestly a wash, just pick the one that gives you a warmer fuzzy feeling in your tummy.
5.4 is great. I use it for python professionally and for typescript/front-end games and educational apps recreationally. In my experience it's roughly as good as opus, just a lot cheaper. It's amazing how much usage you get for $20/mo
Codex has better quality and way more usage, but Claude Code is more pleasant to interact with and use in a lot of tiny ways
gpt-5.4 is unmatched. Claude is possibly better in web UI tasks, but not much else.
this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.
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 don't think there has been any exponential in terms on inference costs in the last couple of years. In fact, they have worsened as the same relevant hardware is more expensive and so is energy - and to top it off, to stay SotA companies are using larger models with higher running costs. But for some reason people are conflating the improvements in models with the cost of inference.
> this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down
I've also heard that, we're near the end of the exponential.
What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.
Not only do I not keep up with the tech itself, I don’t even keep up with how to pay for it.
This pricing only really makes sense if the users can predict their usage, if not people that use this heavily are just going to be hamstrung and are going to start rationing their usage.
What if the goal was to draw us away from building our own AI data centers with their cheaper prices then eventually make us pay up for the difference?
from what they wrote, they're just changing how they measure the usage; might even be a good thing if you manage your context right:
> This format replaces average per-message estimates for your plan with a direct mapping between token usage and credits. It is most useful when you want a clearer view of how input, cached input, and output affect credit consumption.
I wish the Chinese would release a model comparable with 5.4 and free me from this pain
which ones have you tried? some are not far off, but it depends on what you do
Makes sense. Right now the subscriptions are like Uber as I remember it in NYC in 2014.
Can a "tip your code assistant" button be far behind?
The current pricing model (for plus) feels deliberately confusing to me, I can never really tell if I'm nearing any kind of limit with my account since nothing really seems to tell me.
5h and weekly resets remain, but the quotas are now ‘filled’ differently?
Does this mean there’s no such thing as a “subscription” to ChatGPT for businesses? I thought they offered businesses a subscription with some amount of built in quota previously, including for the side products like codex and sora.
There are still subscriptions that give access to both ChatGPT and Codex, but with a much smaller usage quota than before the change (which came at the same time as the end of the 2x promo). I couldn't find the equivalent in terms of credit for the usage included with these $20/25 seats...
So migrate to gemini now?
If you use Google's tooling but not if you need API access. API access is not in the subscriptions and uses token based pricing. For development I find that the Gemini IDE plugins that have good free usage and are included in the subscriptions aren't great. Gemini plug-in under IntelliJ is often broken, etc. The best experience is with other tools like Cline where you've had to use a developer based account which is API usage based already.
But Gemini's API based usage also has a free tier and if that doesn't work for you (they train on your data) and you've never signed up before you get several hundred dollars in free credits that expire after 90 days. 3 months of free access is a pretty good deal.
wouldn’t it be “usage based pricing” not “pricing based usage”
I'm confused as to how pricing works.
For home projects, I almost exclusively use the web chat interface to code. I haven't done anything large yet so I will iterate and get the web chat to update code, print out the code that I copy and paste.
How does this differ in terms of pricing than Codex?
Token-based usage accounting is more accurate and therefore more sustainable than message-count-based usage accounting. It should've been this way to begin with.
good. just like the Claude model. getting the pricing to be in line with costs is the only way this remains sustainable.
I would prefer if it actually explodes sooner rather than later