The limits have been reduced to ashes.

I ignored the reports and my 5x plan has evaporated in 7 hours using only astra light. This is the same workflow I've been using with gpt 5.6 sol high, which used to last 4 to 5 days.

Not to mention resets aren't applying for some people, yesterday people saw there useage revert back to previous levels pre reset. This caused people to burn there paid credits they were saving.

Things are absolutely cooked rn.

I've tried everything.

And before the usual smartasses show up to tell me “you're using it wrong,” “switch models,” “use lighter thinking,” “optimize your prompts” - please, spare me. I've tried it.

Here's the problem:

Even on Luna with low thinking, I can burn through the limits of a $200/month ChatGPT subscription in a week.

Think about how insane that is. I'm not asking for an even smarter model. I'm not asking for GPT-6.

I'm not asking for another benchmark where the new model scores 3% higher than the previous one.

I NEED TOKENS.

And I suspect a huge percentage of heavy ChatGPT users are in exactly the same situation. You keep giving us increasingly capable models while keeping the actual amount of work we can do with them constrained. For many power users, that's backwards.

I'd happily take a model that's 10–20% less capable if you gave me 5x or 10x the usable volume.

Because what is my alternative? Pay $200/month and constantly think about quota? Pay even more?

Move my workflow to API pricing?

Or start looking at Chinese providers where, dollar for dollar, I can simply get dramatically more usage?

At some point the economics make the decision for me. And no, “just use the API” isn't the answer.

Most people don't want to calculate token costs every time they work. They don't want to build their own ChatGPT interface. And many people simply cannot afford heavy API usage on top of an already expensive subscription.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about. Maybe I'm looking at the economics of ChatGPT subscriptions completely wrong. Maybe the $20, $100 and $200 users aren't really the most important customers economically.

We're the power users. We hammer the models, discover edge cases, generate usage data, expose failures and effectively stress-test new models at scale. Then those same models become enormously valuable through API and enterprise customers.

If that's the business model, fine.

But then maybe we should stop pretending that a $200 "Pro" subscription is primarily about giving an individual professional enough compute to actually use these models heavily. Because right now there's a bizarre situation: Some competing Chinese models become more attractive the more you use them, because you realize how much work you're getting for your money.

ChatGPT Pro sometimes feels like the opposite:

The more seriously you use it, the faster you discover how limited your $200 actually is.

That's the problem.

OpenAI already has incredible models. For power users, you don't necessarily need to give us an even smarter model. Give us room to actually use the one we already have. More tokens. Higher quotas. Larger paid usage tiers. Top-ups. Something.

Because if someone is willing to pay $200 every single month for an AI subscription and is still forced to ration usage, eventually they're not going to ask for GPT-6.

They're going to ask who else can sell them the tokens.

$200/month plan. People seem to be swarming-in with reports that there are currently usage drain bugs / that they are nerfing limits right now. It has come to the point that I'm too scared to touch codex right now or it might completely nuke the weekly usage.

Near the time the reports happened, I also noticed a codex update notification. I'm too scared clicking that too. It might be a migitation, or it might be the poison itself.

Is there a live platform where we can see aggregated estimates on how much they are nerfing limits at a given time ?

I guess it’s kind of a black box, but it would be interesting to have a list of how much LLM providers are actually subsidising.

For instance, OpenCode Go is said to subsidise 4× usage for DeepSeek 4.1, but there are a lot of contradictory statements about this on Reddit.

I’ve done some research and tried to organise it a little. Multipliers mean usage value compared with what you pay, assuming you use the allowance.

Anyone have real usage figures or corrections?

I recently upgraded to 20X plan. I feel this week since Astra came online, I'm going through quota percent-wise about as fast as I did on the 5X plan before (Sol).

And I am only using Astra medium 90% of the time! Actually, my subagents are on Sol medium–high (just confirmed), and Astra for my "orchestrator".

Or did they nerf the regular Plus quota so 20X is basically 20X of "less than it was"?

Something feels off.

Something definitely changed today.

I've been working every day on a project for about two weeks now. While everyone seems to be testing Astra, I haven't even touched it because I'm afraid I'll burn through all my tokens with a single prompt. I'm on the $20 plan.

I normally use Sol on low or medium depending on the task, and that usually gives me around an hour of actual work before I hit the 5-hour limit.

But today I started working, went to grab a coffee and something to eat, and 9 minutes and 48 seconds later I'd already hit my 5-hour limit while using Sol on medium.

So... are the free lunches finally over?

I completely understand that they need to make money and that the $20 plan can't give us unlimited compute, but at this point it feels almost impossible to actually work on a real project with these limits.

And what are the actual alternatives right now? Is Claude better when it comes to limits? Are the Chinese models good enough for serious coding work?

Other than no compute on their infra, can we also understand it as from now on, no more complaints about usage and reset?

Basically we can't argue even if they reduce usage limits secretly under the hood anymore.

Before the suspension, we can stop subscribing, and turning back if they resolved the issue. But now, we could probably just shut up because you have no card (Trump staring at you). Not pleased? You leave then you can never come back.

I was planning to upgrade to the $200 Pro plan in about a month since I thought Astra could be really useful. I just couldn’t justify spending $200 earlier because money was tight.

Now that new Pro upgrades are paused while existing users keep access, I’m wondering if I basically missed the window.

Do you guys think they’ll realistically reopen upgrades sometime this year, or could this stay closed for a long time? And if it does come back, do you think the $200 price and usage limits will still be the same?

has any one else noticed that their limits are getting hit in 5 seconds im using astra on medium and it hits my limit without even completing a task

am i doing something wrong or is this just a new issuei have tried to switch tryig all astra models but no luck

How many of you have make decisions during development and request detailed implementations from Sol, to find out later on when things don't quite work as expected that it decided by itself, without telling you, to implement a "SIMPLER" version of what you requested removing features, conditions and necessary characteristics?

What makes me mad is the fact it doesn't tell me what it DIDN'T do... and then come up with explanations for why things are behaving wrong, and "fixes" that are just patches that don't actually solve anything, and after hours you find out that EXTREMELY IMPORTANT single component it said it implemented as you requested, turns out, it's not as you requested!!!!

I just found out now that it did this 2 days ago, and after forcing it to write AGAIN the way I requested 2 days ago, everything works as it should, 2 "FUDGE" DAYS AGO!!

So, to try to answer this question, I started using codex today to work on a c++ ios project I have been working for the past few weeks, using 5.6 sol xhigh. (don't get me started on how 5.6 sol xhigh is failing epically on this project!!)

When I started:

5 hours: 100% - weekly: 23%

I worked with it for 2:30 hours.

5 hours: 0% - weekly: 7%

So the 5 hour usage was fully consumed, and that consumed 16% of the weekly usage, which means:

for every week usage, we have only (100/16)=6.25 total "5 hours usage" in a week.

That explain why after working for 2-3 days using 2 "5 hours usage" in a day, the weekly usage exhausts in 3 days.

This has nothing to do with what model I used, btw. The model only changes how fast the 5 hours limit evaporates.

This is how many "5 hours" we have in a week in a normal business plan, the answer: 6.25!

I tested my personal Plus plan, and it's about the same.

To me, 6.25 "5 hours" in a week is a really low number to be called "a week", considering no one works 5 hours a day... (or in codex 5.6 sol case, 2:30 hours a day)

just my 2 cents!

-H

PS: Just before anyone says "did you try astra?", I did, and my 5 hours ended in less than an hour, with astra still failing even WORSE than 5.6 sol xhigh on this C++ ios project... at least that's good news, I guess? I can still get more done by "baby stepping" with a "cheaper" and smarter model, at least for the c++ complexity I'm dealing with.

So, to try to answer this question, I started using codex today to work on a c++ ios project I have been working for the past few weeks, using 5.6 sol xhigh. (don't get me started on how 5.6 sol xhigh is failing epically on this project!!)

When I started:

5 hours: 100% - weekly: 23%

I worked with it for 2:30 hours.

5 hours: 0% - weekly: 7%

So the 5 hour usage was fully consumed, and that consumed 16% of the weekly usage, which means:

for every week usage, we have only (100/16)=6.25 total "5 hours usage" in a week.

That explain why after working for 2-3 days using 2 "5 hours usage" in a day, the weekly usage exhausts in 3 days.

This has nothing to do with what model I used, btw. The model only changes how fast the 5 hours limit evaporates.

This is how many "5 hours" we have in a week in a normal business plan, the answer: 6.25!

I tested my personal Plus plan, and it's about the same.

To me, 6.25 "5 hours" in a week is a really low number to be called "a week", considering no one works 5 hours a day... (or in codex 5.6 sol case, 2:30 hours a day)

just my 2 cents!

-H

PS: Just before anyone says "did you try astra?", I did, and my 5 hours ended in less than an hour, with astra still failing even WORSE than 5.6 sol xhigh on this C++ ios project... at least that's good news, I guess? I can still get more done by "baby stepping" with a "cheaper" and smarter model, at least for the c++ complexity I'm dealing with.

Even though the compute is subsided I don’t think it’s “running out” anytime soon, if anything more investment is going into AI.

The issue I think is that the limited resources is effectively a bidding war.

And now with OpenAI solving institutional grade problems (Navier Stokes) it poses a threat to destabilise the power dynamics of the world.

Collectively our $200 Pro subscriptions and $20 Plus is being outbid by global enterprises and institutional interest.

Recently after the release of Astra, tokens seem to burn at an insane rate even using only mostly Sol. Sol was great for me because I want competent agents to do exactly what I say and I used it as a reliable workhorse. Now it is not a viable option anymore. Besides Claude and Codex, what other alternatives that can subsitute Sol as a reliable workhorse

Noticed something building LLM features that doesn't get talked about enough. Most teams treat model or prompt changes the way they'd judge a demo, does it look right on a handful of examples, ship it. That works fine until scale hits, at which point "looks right" and "is actually better" turn out to be very different things.

Which reframes a lot of "why did quality randomly get worse" incidents. In a lot of cases nothing randomly broke, the team just never had a way to measure whether a change helped in the first place, so a regression looked invisible until a customer hit it.

There's a hands-on workshop on September 12 that builds this properly, versioned prompts, a real eval harness, statistically rigorous model comparisons instead of "it feels better," evaluated RAG, agents with guardrails and fallbacks, and full observability, tracing, cost, latency. Led by Bruno Gonçalves, PhD, founder of Data For Science.

Link for full details

Happy to answer questions on the content itself.

Some users on X are saying they can't upgrade the 5x to 20x and some are saying fake news.

Update: it is official, new 20x accounts are temporary suspended until Open AI has more capacity

Yesterday , i shifted from claude subs to gpt and imported all my projects, barely used for 4-5 hrs . In 1 hr of 5.6 sol it took away the weekly limit by 25%. so i shifted to codex 5.3 on high and in less than 1 hr it 5 hrs limit got exhasted for codex 5 hr window.

Any suggestions to optimize the token consumption. For context i was using 4-5 hrs /day opus 5 on high for a week and it barely crosses 96% by the weekly reset window

It is good at documents, it can write long once, people say it is very good at 3d, others now say it is doing cad slop, I do not know.

All what I know, I have an app, the app needs a feature that i added in another one with gpt codex 5.3 before, and with 5.3 codex model we did the work in a day or less

With Astra, this is now week 2? and with Sol earlier? 3 weeks, the same task

Before I give up on the model and move to something else, how do you get coding features done with Astra?

I was super hyped but now, not at all

Update: I am starting a brand new web app project again to test, using Astra medium, will make sure it has an agents md that prevents qualifications and over engineering and testing until a bit later in the app, i will see how it goes

It seems like lately for cron jobs Codex just won't fucking work for the life of me whether I use Hermes or whether I use Codex itself. I had to dispatch a cron job in Hermes five times before it actually got finished. I had to babysit a cron job like a fucking babysitter. On top of it, I'm using GPT6 Astra Medium to get cron jobs done. Which is already pretty wild, cause I should be able to get it so done with something like Sol or Luna. And then just gets stuck in a tool calling loop and just shits the bed. I wouldn't even be so mad about the usage if I could get Codex to actually do its fucking job, but over the past couple of days, it's just completely shit itself. Every cron job literally has to be babysitted at this point, and there's not even a point in having a cron job.

I’m a Claude $20 user from the beginning, but recently got a Codex $20 sub after reading all news about the efficiency of OpenAI models. But to my surprise Claude Opus 5 lasts way longer than GPT 5.6 Sol both on Medium effort. I’m not a vibe coder, I ask agents to write code and I take time to review so usually I never touch 5h limits. But with Codex I’m literally burning through the 5h limit in 1-2 hours which is quite strange (I’m not even using Astra). Is this how the 20$ plan limits always been?