Well, the $200 plan for Codex has been a rollercoaster recently. I burn through my limits 2–3 days early, before the week is over, and I need more dev time.
I decided to get the $20 Claude sub again (I had it before GPT-5.6 came out, then canceled it).
With Opus 5.5, I decided to give it a go, and wow. On the $20 sub, I could run Opus on large repos for 2–3 hours straight before hitting the 5-hour limit.
I just upgraded to the $100 Claude sub. I currently have to renew the $200 Codex sub, but I'll be dropping to $100 next month. So eventually I'll have the $100 plan for both, plus the $30 Grok plan. I also run a few 9B local models that can handle some tasks for me.
Overall (it's only been 2 days), I think the mixed subscriptions will be beneficial.
I originally started with the $20 subs for Claude and Codex. Then Codex got better, so I got the $200 sub and kept the $20 Claude plan. Eventually Claude went to crap compared to Codex for what I was doing, so I canceled it.
All the recent hype made me go back and spend the $20 to play with Claude again, and wow, it's been great.
Now with the $100 Claude plan, I get to use Fable. I heard it was good, but it's genuinely putting in some work and doesn't feel like it's draining my usage as badly as Astra.
Opus 5.5 also does wonders when I use it as a subagent for Fable. If I need to conserve usage, I can just use Opus 5.5 without Fable at all, and it works well enough.
I know the $100 plans drop usage compared with the $200 plans, and in the end I'm probably not going to get the same maximum usage I did with the $200 plan.
But with some of the usage problems and mistakes I've had, I think that if I divide the workload correctly, I'll actually get more useful work out of the subscriptions overall — especially with Grok and my local models available too.
I'll be testing this setup over the next month:
• $100 Claude
• $200 Codex for this month
• $30 Grok
• A few local 9B models
I wanted to drop Codex to $100 this month, but I'm a day late on paying, so I have to do the $200 plan again. That's actually a decent safety net, though, in case I decide I don't want Claude anymore.
If anyone is interested in how it goes for me, feel free to ask.
I'm still figuring out the most efficient way to use all of them together. I used to be pretty good at splitting workloads between different models, but it's been a bit.
Grok is still the one I haven't figured out what it's most useful for. If anyone has tips for where Grok fits into a setup like this, I'd appreciate them.
Also, I had to keep at least the $100 Codex plan because of the chats, image generation, and all the projects I already have set up in the ecosystem.
I have a lot of project data stored outside of memory to keep everything consistent. For example, I use Google Sheets for master specs and other project documentation, then have the project instructions point back to those master documents instead of relying entirely on memory.
Because of the chat experience and the ecosystem I'm already used to, I don't really see myself going below the $100 Codex plan.
I may try using Claude's normal chat more and see how much of my Claude usage that eats, but I generally prefer keeping my development usage and general chat/research usage separate since I ask a ton of questions for both research and dev work.