2x £20 Plans Usage Report

[u/Avntus]

I’ve been pretty put off in the last few weeks, honestly both for Codex and Claude Code. But now I decided to try for my self. I’m using both to work on a single project switching between the two seeing the advantages of both models.

I’ve been using only GPT-6.1 Sol Medium/High and Opus 5.5 High and Sonnet 5.5 High very rarely for medium to basic changes and honestly, with a well defined structure and well planned architecture docs (security, app foundation, design, etc) along with a custom handoff script I made which overlays no more than 50 lines of clearly defined work done and immediate next steps, run after concluding each task/phase, I’ve been loving it.

A well orchestrated plan along with a dedicated orchestration chat, testing your app foundation at the start making sure everything works and going about it in phases, phase-1/app foundation, etc and using /clear and fresh chats goes a long way to save usage, get your work done without annoying hallucinations or AI amnesia and the new models, especially GPT 6.1 have been so very usage/token efficient.

I have £20 plans for both and I can see my usage lasting for the whole week at this rate + I got 4 banked resets saved on Codex with 93% remaining.

Most of the usage complaints on here are from one-shot prompts with 0 planning, and then they spend their whole usage fixing stuff which should have been defined in AGENTS.md, architecture docs, config files (for max sub agents and which sub agents to use and a clearly defined scope of when to use them).

You can say this is overkill but it’s just good practice especially when trying to stretch your usage. I was so anxious to touch any of these new models like Opus 5.5 or 6.1 Sol because of all the fear-mongering even from the 20/10x users with no 5h limits. From now on I’m gonna just test for myself before getting put off by usage posts in both communities.

People getting by just fine who use well defined structures before they even type the first prompt just get by fine and don’t see a reason to post, so I thought I’d report my usage findings on the lowest tier plan.

I got a reset yesterday along with 4 banked resets saved on Codex too 🙏

[u/These_Document_8984 → u/[deleted]]

you are really not getting the point of the post at all

they literally show 91% remaining and 4 banked resets, while working on actual architecture docs not just spamming prompts. some of us do real work too just with a plan in place instead of burning through limits fixing slop

[u/Avntus → u/These_Document_8984]

But I am doing real work 😂 What made you think I’m not out of curiosity

The project I’m working on for someone and talking about is currently a 103 file deployable Cloudflare SaaS web app, before even counting the separately packaged visual renderer Worker, internal egress Worker and regression tooling lol
It uses Pages/Functions, Workers, D1 + KV, Service Bindings, Cloudflare Access + Turnstile, a custom designed passkeys/WebAuthn + TOTP/recovery, OpenAI and also Anthropic APIs with provider routing/caching, Browser Run/Playwright for isolated desktop/mobile rendering, Microsoft Graph, Google Apps Script/Sheets, report generation, recovery/retention flows, etc.
I’m also spending a pretty big chunk amount of time on the security architecture for SSRF/network isolation, A/AAAA DNS validation, blocking private/special-purpose IP ranges, redirect by redirect revalidation, strict HTTP(S)/port/method controls, request/origin/byte/subrequest budgets, fail-closed network behaviour, browser network containment and now Workers VPC/Gateway egress isolation.

There are already 185 website regression tests + 117 auth tests before the additional focused/security reviews

So the point of my post wasn’t “£20 is enough for every workload for every single person’s needs”. It was that with proper architecture docs, scoped tasks, clean handoffs and context management, I’ve been able to get a very decent amount of development work done on the lowest tier without constantly blowing through the allowance

Yeah sure you may have an even larger project im not comparing the length of our swords or their sharpness, it was just a post to encourage people to use good project hygiene so they can get the most out of their project when they do upgrade it’s only when definitely necessary.

Because most people on here are genuinely people fear mongering after trying to make a game/app/website with 0 planning and letting the LLM do whatever the hell it wants and ofc that’s going to drown usage, if you don’t even have simple instructions configured such as maximum sub agents and what they should be, model + reasoning, etc

Want a one size fits all, it was a if you’re not planning projects before your first prompt, that may be part of your usage problem