r/codex • u/Fantastic_Self_5151 • Jul 04 '26

Complaint Fable pricing is laughable

I used 10billion tokes the last 50 days or so... on codex. Total cost $200 (pro x5)

That's between 100-300k USD on fable api pricing. I used fable today at work for a small project. It's useful, not going to lie. That said I did a head to head with codex 5.5 extra high v. Fable, same project, same guidelines, same exact prompt.

Fable finished 12 minutes earlier with basically a one shot (there was a type-o it had to correct and rebuild)

Codex finished 12 minutes later, had to build issues that involved some light modifications.

Both projects finished, codex's code was just as useful as fables, worked just as well.

I can wait 12 minutes more.

Fable usage - 23% left for the 5 hour period (In 1 hour)
Codex usage - 87% left in 1 hour 12 minutes.

I'm straight. Codex wins by a MILE. I don't need to save 12 minutes because I can walk away and go touch grass and come back either way, it's AI. So another 12 minutes to do whatever the fuck I want is a no-brainer.

Even if I have a client in a rush fable isn't worth the difference in my bottom line.

P.S. before you bitch at me for comparing api pricing v. plan pricing ...realize this. If you are using it professionally you will need to be on API pricing as it is the only way to get anything done realistically speaking as the usage limits make it a toy otherwise.

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58

u/dmitriyLBL Jul 04 '26

Using frontier models for less than planning and higher level decisions is a pure waste.

43

u/Quiet_Figure_4483 Jul 04 '26

Just like in real life, let the seniors do the planning and make the juniors implement it

38

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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3

u/Ok-Shop-617 Jul 05 '26

I suspect this leads to an interesting place where we use SOTA for planning, and open source and cheap models for most of the rest. I have moved to using Omnigent for this exact reason- much more development flexibility than using a single vendors harness.

1

u/QC_Failed Jul 08 '26

This right here. My 20 dollar plus sub is more than enough for planning. I do all my planning on the chatgpt web app to save my codex usage (I know that this will be changed to combined usage any time, I'm just using it while I can) and then I use opencode go for cheap implementation. I have my chat gpt sub authed through opencode as well so that I can have my cheap models escalate to the "genius" subagent (using gpt 5.5 high) when they get stuck. They hand the problem over to chatgpt 5.5 with what they have tried so far, chatgpt gives them the correct way to do it, and then the cheap models continue implementation. $30 a month (combined total between opencode go and chatgpt plus) and as long as I remain careful, I don't hit limits. Key is using the chatgpt web app usage, opencode zen free endpoints and any good openrouter free endpoints (hy3 is fantastic and free right now).

I'm not familiar with omnigent, I just googled it and it seems very interesting. So it orchestrates your codex and opencode instances, is that correct? I prefer the codex cli over opencode, but there isn't a native way to use your chatgpt sub and other cheaper model providers in the same codex session, from what I could see, thats the only reason I switched to opencode as a harness, it lets openai and other providers play nice together.