Codex Pricing Is Not the $20 You Think
Codex pricing in October 2026: Free to Pro 500, what a credit costs per model, why Pro 200 halves on October 30, and what a real task bills you.
Codex pricing has no standalone line. Codex comes with your ChatGPT plan: Free, Go at 8 dollars, Plus at 20, Pro at 100, 200 or 500, and Business at 20 per seat, per OpenAI's pricing page in October 2026. Usage past that is billed in credits worth about 4 cents each, and Pro 200 loses half its allowance on October 30.
Updated October 26, 2026 · by the AITerm team
what one Codex credit works out to against API rates, so 25 credits is roughly a dollar
how much more an output token costs than an input token, on every GPT-6 model in Codex
the Pro 200 allowance, measured in Plus units, before and after October 30, 2026
Key takeaways
- The plan line is the smallest part of the bill. OpenAI's own estimate for real spend is 100 to 200 dollars per developer per month.
- From October 30, every paid tier costs the same 20 dollars per Plus allowance. Upgrading buys volume and a missing window, never a discount.
- Output tokens cost five times input on GPT-6 models. Cached input costs a twentieth of fresh input on GPT-6.1 Sol. You pay for how long the model writes and thinks.
- Your model choice moves the price of the same task by a factor of 100, far more than any plan change.
- Plus has a 5 hour window shared by the CLI, the IDE extension and cloud tasks. Pro has none for now, only a weekly limit that may apply.
| Plan | Price | Codex allowance | 5 hour window | Who it is actually for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | GPT-6 Luna, desktop app | No number published | Seeing what an agent does |
| Go | $8 / mo | GPT-6 Luna, desktop app | No number published | Lightweight tasks, no CLI |
| Plus | $20 / mo | 1x, CLI, IDE, cloud | Yes | The plan most people mean by "Codex pricing" |
| Pro 100 | $100 / mo | 5x Plus | None for now | Daily driver, parallel sessions |
| Pro 200 | $200 / mo | 20x, then 10x from Oct 30 | None, and not coming back | Teams of one running agents all day |
| Pro 500 | $500 / mo | About 25x, plus Ultrafast | None for now | People blocked waiting on Astra output |
| Business | $20 / user annual, $25 monthly | Plus limits per seat, credit top ups | Yes | Teams from two seats up |
| Enterprise / Edu | Contact sales | Plus limits, or credits only | None on flexible pricing | Central billing and admin controls |
How much does Codex actually cost per month?
Between 100 and 200 dollars per developer, by the estimate OpenAI gives in its Codex rate card help article, and that is the number worth planning against. The plan line is 8, 20, 100, 200 or 500 dollars. Credits turn it into a real bill, because since April 2, 2026 Codex counts tokens rather than messages, and anything past your included usage is paid in credits.
You're probably about to open the pricing page, read the grid, and stop there. That grid is the cover charge. It tells you what you pay to be allowed in, not what an afternoon of agent work removes from your allowance.
At AITerm, a native macOS terminal for piloting Claude Code and Codex agent sessions, we price Codex the way the rate card does: tokens in, tokens out, tokens served from cache, multiplied by the rate of the model you picked. Our Cost page runs that calculation locally on the session logs Codex already writes to ~/.codex/sessions, at public API rates, and labels the result "an estimate, not a bill". On a subscription, that figure is the value your plan delivered, not money you owe.
Look, the spread inside that range is not random. Three choices you control decide it: the model for routine work, how much of each request comes from cache, and the speed mode.
Opinion
Stop trimming your AGENTS.md to save money. On GPT-6.1 Sol, a 6,000 token project file costs about 1.2 cents when it is sent fresh and 0.06 cents once it is cached, which is what happens on every turn after the first. A good one shortens the reasoning that actually bills you. Keeping context lean is real advice about quality. It is terrible advice about cost.
Codex pricing plans, and what each tier buys
Every tier buys the same Codex. What changes is how much of it you get, whether a 5 hour window sits on top, and which models you can reach. Free and Go are limited to GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app. Plus opens the CLI, the IDE extension, iOS, cloud integrations and the Sol models. Pro 500 is the only individual plan with Ultrafast.
Here's the thing about the multipliers. Divide each price by its allowance in Plus units and, from October 30, you get the same answer on every paid tier.
So, the honest reading of the grid in late October 2026: there is no volume discount left. The old Pro 200, at 10 dollars per Plus allowance, was the one tier that rewarded heavy use, and that is precisely the one OpenAI halved. What you buy above Plus is the absence of a 5 hour window, access to Ultrafast at the top, and raw volume at a flat rate.
In practice, the question is never which plan has the features. It is how many hours a day you keep an agent busy. One session on Plus is fine. Two sessions on Plus share one window and burn it twice as fast, which is the real argument for Pro 100.
And yes, usage based billing still exists, just not where most people look. Enterprise and Edu workspaces on flexible pricing have no fixed rate limits and pay credits for what they use. Any plan can also run local Codex sessions with an API key, billed at API rates, without the cloud features. New pay as you go Business seats, the earlier version of this idea, stopped being offered on June 24, 2026.
What changes for Pro 200 on October 30?
Its included Codex and ChatGPT Work usage drops from 20 times to 10 times the Plus allowance, and GPT-6 Pro chat messages go from 200 to 100 per week. OpenAI announced the change at DevDay on September 29, 2026, alongside the new 500 dollar tier.
Existing Pro 200 subscribers keep their current limits through October 29. They also get a one time grant of 2,500 dollars in usage credits that expire at the end of the year. And OpenAI said it will not reintroduce the 5 hour limit on Pro 200, so the weekly limit stays the only ceiling.
Spend the grant on purpose
2,500 dollars of credits that vanish on December 31 is the cheapest compute you will get this year. Queue the big migrations and test backfills for November and December.
Re-check your weekly burn
If last week's weekly gauge peaked above 50 percent, the same work will hit the cap after October 30. Measure it now with /status, not when a session gets refused.
Price Pro 100 against Pro 200
Both have no 5 hour window and the same rate per Plus unit. If your weekly use fits in 5x, the extra 100 dollars buys headroom you do not touch.
Honestly, this is the second time in four months that the published Codex limits changed under people's feet. The 5 hour window was lifted on July 12, a restoration announced for July 30 was postponed, and it came back for Plus only on August 25. Our own first version of this page had the July 30 date. If a Codex pricing article has no date on it, close the tab.
What does one Codex credit cost?
About 4 cents. OpenAI does not print a dollar price per credit, and says purchase prices depend on your plan, but the rate card lines up exactly with API pricing: GPT-6.1 Sol costs 50 credits per million input tokens in Codex and 2 dollars per million on the API. Divide one by the other and a credit is worth 4 cents, so 25 credits is roughly a dollar.
| Model | Input | Cached input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra | 250 credits · ~$10 | 25 · ~$1 | 1,250 · ~$50 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 50 · ~$2 | 2.5 · ~$0.10 | 250 · ~$10 |
| GPT-6 Sol | 50 · ~$2 | 5 · ~$0.20 | 250 · ~$10 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 2.5 · ~$0.10 | 0.25 · ~$0.01 | 12.5 · ~$0.50 |
Rates are per million tokens at Standard speed, from OpenAI's pricing page in October 2026, with the dollar column derived at 4 cents per credit. Two ratios matter more than any single cell. Output costs five times input on all four models. And Astra output costs 100 times Luna output.
Turns out the speed modes are a third lever, and the most expensive one. Fast mode uses your included usage 2.5 times faster than Standard. Ultrafast on GPT-6 Astra or GPT-6.1 Sol uses it 8 times faster. On purchased credits the multipliers are 2x and 6x.
Here is what that does to one realistic task: 100,000 tokens of fresh context in, 20,000 tokens of output. The same arithmetic OpenAI's examples use, run on three models, with and without most of the context served from cache.
Look at the cached Sol line. 5 of its 6.2 credits are output. That is why OpenAI's own guidance says a typical GPT-5.6 Sol task uses 2 to 15 credits, roughly 8 to 60 cents, and why the range is that wide: the length of the answer and the depth of the reasoning decide it, not the size of your repo.
Honestly, our own tooling taught us how easy this is to get wrong. Codex does not log usage per turn. It writes a running total for the whole session, and its input_tokens field already includes the cached tokens. Read the last line naively and you bill a whole session to one day. Add cached and input together and you double the biggest line item. Our Cost page imputes the difference between successive totals and subtracts the cache before pricing anything.
Where to read your Codex usage
Three surfaces, and they answer different questions, which is exactly why people think the numbers disagree. Our Codex usage limits guide goes deeper, down to reading the limits straight from your session logs.
# how much of the 5 hour and weekly windows you have burned
/status
# token totals, and where you redeem a banked reset
/usage
/usage daily
/usage weekly
# put the two window percentages in your prompt line, permanently
/statusline # opt in to five-hour-limit and weekly-limit
# history across days, from the logs on your disk
ccusage codex daily| Where | What it tells you | What it will not tell you |
|---|---|---|
/status | Percentage of the 5 hour window and the weekly cap consumed | Your credit balance |
/usage | Token totals by day and week, plus reset redemption | What those tokens cost in dollars |
| Web usage page | Credit balance, reset timestamps, cloud task history | Nothing much, but it is a browser tab away from your terminal |
ccusage codex daily | Local log history across days and sessions | Your real credit spend, since costs are API equivalent estimates |
One more surface most people never find: banked resets. Plus and Pro subscribers each got one complimentary reset when the mechanism launched on June 11, 2026, and referrals can earn more, up to three during the promotional window. They expire 30 days after they are granted. Check /usage before you assume a dead window means a dead afternoon.
The five hour window is the real unit on Plus
On Plus and standard Business, Codex meters a rolling 5 hour window with a weekly limit that may apply on top. OpenAI estimates the window at 5 to 45 local messages on GPT-6 Astra, 15 to 160 on GPT-6.1 Sol and 350 to 3,000 on GPT-6 Luna. Pro plans currently have no 5 hour limit at all.
The part that catches people out is the sharing. Local CLI messages, requests from the IDE extension and tasks you delegate to the Codex cloud all draw from one allowance, and OpenAI says cloud tasks may use more of it than local messages. Delegating to the cloud does not buy you a second budget.
Weekly numbers are not published on any plan. Every plan table carries a footnote saying weekly limits may apply, with no figure beside it, which is why the community threads are full of people reverse engineering their own caps. On Pro, that weekly gauge is the only one that ever moves.
Parallel agents spend the same window faster
Yes, and on a subscription that is the whole story. Two Codex sessions doing sustained work draw from one window at roughly twice the rate of one. Four draw at roughly four times the rate. Running more agents on Plus does not buy you more throughput per window. It buys the same throughput, compressed into a shorter slot, followed by a wall.
Fair question: why not stagger them instead? That is exactly what we do. Two agents on the heavy work, a third on review, and the next task queued rather than launched, because a task started at 80 percent window consumption is a task you will restart later from a cold cache. And a cold restart repays the context at the fresh input rate, twenty times the cached rate on 6.1 Sol.
The trap
Cloud tasks feel like free parallelism because they run on someone else's machine. They are not. Since DevDay, cloud tasks keep running while your laptop is closed, and they still draw on the same allowance as local work. Offloading three long jobs to the cloud while you keep working locally is the fastest way to hit a cap you did not see coming.
This is the problem we built the quota panel in AITerm to solve. AITerm reads the rate_limits snapshot Codex writes into its session logs and shows the 5 hour and weekly window for every Codex and Claude Code account next to the agent sessions burning it, with a macOS notification at 75 percent and again at 90. No command to type, no browser tab, which matters most when four panes are all spending from one pool.
Is Claude Code cheaper than Codex?
Usually not, and the gap is smaller than the loudest threads claim. The subscription tiers line up at 20, 100 and 200 dollars, so price differences come mostly from token consumption. Third party measurements published in 2026 put Claude Code at roughly 1.4 times the tokens of Codex on matched tasks, working out near 23 percent higher cost for equivalent work.
And yes, you will also find a widely shared anecdote about one complex refactor costing 155 dollars on Claude Code against 15 on Codex. Treat it as one. A 10x gap on a single task says more about how the two agents were prompted than about the price of either.
In practice, we run both daily, so here is our actual allocation rather than a verdict. Codex takes the long mechanical runs where the brief is already written: migrations, test backfills, dependency work across many files. Claude Code takes anything where we want the agent to push back. Our Codex vs Claude Code comparison runs both on the same tickets.
Anthropic doubled the Claude Code 5 hour caps for Pro, Max, Team and seat based Enterprise on May 6, 2026. Since then Codex Pro has dropped its 5 hour window entirely and Pro 200 is about to lose half its allowance. Any cost comparison dated before October is now wrong in at least one direction.
Six habits that cut a Codex bill
None of these are clever. All of them follow directly from the rate card, which is a better foundation than most advice on this topic can claim.
Route routine work to Luna
Renames, test scaffolding and dependency bumps do not need Astra. At 12.5 credits per million output tokens against 1,250, the same task is 100 times cheaper.
Write the acceptance criteria first
A brief with a testable definition of done produces a shorter answer, and output is the expensive half of the rate card at five times input.
Keep Ultrafast for real waits
At 8 times the included usage rate, Ultrafast is worth it when a human is blocked on the answer. For a migration running while you review something else, Standard is fine.
Keep sessions warm
Cached input on 6.1 Sol is a twentieth of fresh input. Restarting a session to "clean up" repays the whole context at full price.
Start heavy runs at the top of a window
On Plus, a migration launched at 75 percent consumption gets interrupted and restarted, and the restart pays for the context again from cold.
Check for a banked reset before you stop
They expire 30 days after they are granted. Run /usage when you hit a cap instead of closing the laptop.
The habit we left off that list is measuring. We learned it the hard way in our own app: the first version of our chat composer computed the cost of the conversation at the end of every turn, then used it only for an alert cap and never showed it. The fix landed on August 18. The Cost page went further: it refuses to project a monthly figure until it has an hour of data, because ten dollars spent in two minutes would extrapolate to 216,000.
The short version: budget 100 to 200 dollars per developer and stop arguing about the 20 dollar line. Pick the model before you pick the plan. If you are on Pro 200, spend the grant and re-check your weekly burn before October 30. That's it.
Going further
PILLAR
The Codex CLI guide
Install, approval modes, AGENTS.md and MCP, everything the pricing page assumes you already know.
LIMITS
Codex usage limits explained
Per model ranges, the weekly cap, and how to read your limits from a file on disk.
COMPARISON
Codex vs Claude Code
We run both daily, on the same tickets, and the split is not the one the benchmarks suggest.
CODEX
Skills that earn their context
Input tokens are cheap, but a skill that shortens the reasoning is where the saving actually is.
COMPARE
AI coding agents compared
Codex, Claude Code, Cursor and Gemini CLI side by side, tokens and price included.
QUOTAS
Every window on one screen
Live 5 hour and weekly state per provider, beside the sessions burning it.
Sources
- Codex pricing, OpenAI, checked October 26, 2026: plans from Free to Pro 500 and Business, model access per plan, estimated local messages per 5 hour window per model, "Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit", the weekly limits footnote, credit rates per million tokens, speed mode multipliers, the 2 to 15 credit typical GPT-5.6 Sol task, and the API key route.
- DevDay 2026, OpenAI, September 29, 2026: GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast in Codex on the Pro 500 plan and eligible Enterprise and Edu plans.
- OpenAI halves Pro 200 usage and launches a $500 ChatGPT plan at DevDay, The Next Web, September 29, 2026: the cut from 20x to 10x Plus effective October 30, the GPT-6 Pro message cut, the 2,500 dollar credit grant for existing subscribers, and the decision not to bring back the 5 hour limit.
- ChatGPT Pro 500, what the new plan gets you, MindStudio, October 1, 2026: the reported 25x Plus allowance on Pro 500.
- Codex pricing in 2026, what changed at DevDay, Atoms, updated October 15, 2026: the worked credit examples for GPT-6.1 Sol, the API rates for the Standard tier, and cloud tasks running with the laptop closed on the same allowance.
- Codex rate card, OpenAI Help Center, 2026: the April 2, 2026 move from per message to token based pricing, and the 100 to 200 dollars per developer per month estimate.
- Codex pricing 2026, Verdent, 2026: the reading of OpenAI's 100 to 200 dollar estimate and the variables that move a developer from the low end to the high end.
- Codex Pricing 2026, Morphllm, 2026: the June 24, 2026 end of new pay as you go Business seats.
- Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message, Hacker News, 2026: the developer reaction to the April switch.
- OpenAI reinstates the five-hour limit for Codex on Plus, Mezha, August 25, 2026: the return of the window for Plus while Pro stayed without it.
- Has the 5-hour usage session been removed from Codex CLI?, OpenAI Developer Community, 2026: the July 12 lift and the postponed July 30 restoration.
- ccusage, Codex guide, ryoppippi, 2026: the MIT licensed CLI that reads local agent logs, with costs estimated from public rates.
- codex-reset, 2026: how banked rate limit resets are granted and redeemed, the June 11, 2026 launch grant, the referral cap of three and the 30 day expiry.
- Claude Code limits, 5 hour caps doubled in May 2026, Verdent, 2026: the May 6, 2026 change for Pro, Max, Team and seat based Enterprise.
- Claude Code vs Codex, 23% higher cost per task, Tech Insider, 2026: Claude Code near 1.4 times the tokens of Codex on matched tasks, and the single refactor anecdote treated here as an anecdote.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Codex cost per month?
Codex has no standalone subscription. It comes with your ChatGPT plan: Free at 0 dollars, Go at 8, Plus at 20, Pro at 100, 200 or 500, and Business at 20 per user on annual billing or 25 monthly. Those are entry prices. Once you buy credits past your included usage, OpenAI's rate card help article puts typical spend around 100 to 200 dollars per developer per month, with a wide spread.
Is Codex free?
Partly. The Free plan and the 8 dollar Go plan include Codex for quick, lightweight tasks, limited to GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app and subject to rollout, per OpenAI's pricing page in October 2026. The CLI, the IDE extension, cloud tasks and the stronger Sol models start at Plus. The Codex CLI itself is open source, and you can also run it with an API key, billed per token at API rates.
How much is one Codex credit worth?
OpenAI does not print a dollar price per credit, and purchase prices depend on your plan. Dividing the credit rates by the matching API rates gives about 4 cents per credit: GPT-6.1 Sol costs 50 credits per million input tokens and 2 dollars at API rates. So 25 credits is roughly a dollar, and OpenAI says a typical GPT-5.6 Sol task uses 2 to 15 credits, around 8 to 60 cents.
What changes for ChatGPT Pro 200 on October 30, 2026?
Its included Codex and ChatGPT Work usage drops from 20 times to 10 times the Plus allowance, and GPT-6 Pro chat messages fall from 200 to 100 per week, as reported from OpenAI's DevDay announcements on September 29, 2026. Existing subscribers keep the old limits through October 29 and receive a one time grant of 2,500 dollars in usage credits that expire at year end. OpenAI says the 5 hour limit will not come back on Pro 200.
What are the Codex usage limits?
Plus and standard Business seats get a rolling 5 hour window, estimated at 15 to 160 local messages on GPT-6.1 Sol and 350 to 3,000 on GPT-6 Luna. Pro plans currently have no 5 hour limit. A weekly limit may apply to every plan, and OpenAI publishes no number for it. Local messages and cloud tasks share one allowance, and cloud tasks may use more of it than local work.
What is Codex best used for?
Long, well scoped, mostly mechanical work where you can write the acceptance criteria before you start: migrations, test backfills, dependency bumps across many files, refactors with a clear before and after. That is also the cheapest shape of work under credit billing, because every GPT-6 model bills output at five times its input rate, so a precise brief that produces a short answer costs less than a vague one.
Is Claude Code cheaper than Codex?
Usually not. Subscription tiers line up at 20, 100 and 200 dollars, so the difference comes from token consumption, and third party measurements in 2026 put Claude Code at roughly 1.4 times the tokens of Codex on matched tasks. Codex also has a 500 dollar tier and, on Pro, no 5 hour window. We run both daily and pick per task: Claude Code when we want pushback, Codex for long runs with a written brief.
Can Codex access my computer?
The Codex CLI runs locally and can read files and execute commands in the directory you launched it from, within the approval mode you chose. Cloud tasks run on OpenAI infrastructure against a copy of your repository, not on your laptop. Both draw from the same allowance, which surprises people who assume delegating to the cloud is free. In local mode, only the prompts and file contents the agent sends to the model leave your machine.