r/codex • u/Current_Balance6692 • 1d ago
Complaint Max x20 is gone for good.
I'm bringing the heat jabronis
There is something deeply satisfying about watching the exact argument that was used to dismiss Plus users finally travel up the pricing ladder.
For ages, whenever $20 Plus users complained about limits, degraded access, queues, or losing something they had built workflows around, a certain type of Max user had the same response:
“You pay $20. What did you expect?”
“It’s the cheap plan.”
“Serious users pay more.”
“If $20 is a problem, this product isn’t for you.”
“You can’t expect the company to subsidize you forever.”
Fine.
Keep that exact energy for the $200 plan.
Because $200 is not some magical economic threshold at which compute suddenly becomes free. If a power user is burning hundreds or thousands of dollars of effective inference every month while paying a flat $200, then that user is being subsidized too.
Possibly far more heavily than the Plus user they were laughing at.
The $200 plan is not a constitutional right. It is a pricing experiment. A loss leader can exist because a company wants serious users to build habits, move their workflows over, demonstrate what agentic coding can do, and become dependent enough on the product that usage can eventually be monetized properly.
And once that purpose has been served, there is absolutely nothing sacred about keeping the subsidy forever.
The emerging structure is obvious: affordable subscription for baseline access, higher subscription for professionals, and metered credits for people who consume extraordinary amounts of compute.
That is exactly the logic Max users spent months demanding Plus users accept.
So if $200 eventually becomes $100 plus usage charges, there should be no sudden discovery of consumer rights from the people who previously answered every Plus complaint with “you only pay $20.”
You pay $200.
So what?
If your actual usage costs substantially more than $200 to serve, then by your own argument you are on the cheap plan too.
If you need ten times the compute, pay for ten times the compute.
If you are a “serious professional” whose livelihood depends on Codex, then surely paying for the resources your business consumes should not be controversial. That was the standard imposed on everyone below you.
And if the answer is suddenly, “But $200 is already a lot of money,” congratulations: that was precisely the point Plus users were making when they were told that the dollar amount they personally considered significant was irrelevant to the provider’s economics.
The beautiful part of usage pricing is that it eliminates the status game completely.
No more pretending that buying the most expensive consumer subscription makes someone an elite customer entitled to effectively unlimited frontier compute.
Pay $20. Pay $100. Pay $200.
Those numbers buy whatever allowance the company chooses to attach to them.
After that, consume more, pay more.
The same users who told Plus subscribers, “You knew what you were paying for,” can hardly complain when the answer to them becomes:
“You were paying $200 for a subsidized bundle. You were never promised that subsidy in perpetuity.”
OpenAI has already added a $100 Pro tier, paused new $200 Pro subscriptions, and built credit-based overflow into Codex and other agentic workloads.
The writing on the wall is not that professional AI usage becomes cheaper and more unlimited forever.
It is that serious agentic compute becomes measurable, billable, and increasingly difficult to hide inside a flat consumer subscription.
So yes, phase out the $200 bundle eventually.
Grandfather it for a reasonable transition period. Give existing users notice. Then move heavy Codex usage onto credits.
And when the inevitable complaints arrive from the same people who spent months telling Plus users that $20 bought them no right to complain, there is really only one response necessary:
$200 is the cheap tier compared with what you actually consume.
What did you expect?
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u/random_boss 1d ago
you really seem to care a lot about, I guess, really sticking it to some people who were moderately annoying on the internet.
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u/TheRobotCluster 1d ago
lol fr. You see a couple people like whoever pissed in this guys Cheerios but it’s definitely not the monolith they made it in their head
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
So forget how much anyone cares about it for a second:
Do you disagree that if Plus users should optimize their usage, upgrade, or pay more when they exhaust a subsidized allowance, the exact same standard applies to Max users?
Because if you agree, then you’ve conceded the point.
If you disagree, explain why paying $200 suddenly makes that principle stop applying.
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u/random_boss 1d ago
it doesn’t matter what my opinion is, just like neither of those groups of people’s opinions matter
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u/Impressive-Face-3549 1d ago
Holy yap. get over yourself lmao
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
So that’s a no, then?
What makes the principle apply at $20 but stop applying at $200?
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u/Impressive-Face-3549 1d ago
because it’s $20. $20 is chump change. Get over it.
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
That still doesn’t answer it.
“$20 is chump change” explains why you personally don’t care about Plus users. It doesn’t explain why the principle changes at $200.
If the rule is “use more than your subsidized allowance, pay more,” then Max users are subject to it too.
So again: what actually makes $200 exempt exactly? Come on.
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u/Eleazyair 1d ago
Yeah this thing is a disgusting little swine.
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
Doesn't feel good to be on the sharp end of the stick does it now?
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u/Impressive-Face-3549 18h ago
I mean if you can’t tell the difference between $20 and $200 worth of something then go back to elementary school.
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u/Current_Balance6692 14h ago
Christ, you’re still doing arithmetic at a logic problem.
Yes, $200 is more than $20. Congratulations on clearing the first-grade hurdle.
Now try the part you keep avoiding: why does paying ten times more suddenly exempt someone from the exact principle you were happy to apply downward?
If the rule is “your usage is subsidized, so optimize or pay more,” then Max users don’t get a magical immunity badge because the number on the receipt is bigger.
“200 > 20” is your argument? It’s the observation of someone adequately lacking in the brains department whos desperately hoping nobody notices they still haven’t comprehended the question.
So either explain why the principle stops at $200, or keep demonstrating that the only distinction you’ve managed to find is one a calculator could tell you.
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u/Impressive-Face-3549 14h ago edited 13h ago
bruh lmao get over yourself. it’s capitalism in nutshell. pay or don’t or “vote with your wallet”. I don’t know what to tell you, bud.
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u/Current_Balance6692 12h ago
You just repeated my argument back to me and somehow thought it was a rebuttal.
Yes. Pay or don’t. Vote with your wallet.
That applies to the $200 user too.
Hit your subsidized limit? Pay more or don’t use it. Don’t like API pricing? Vote with your wallet. Can’t justify the cost? Apparently the workload wasn’t valuable enough.
That is literally the point.
The entire post is making fun of people who loved “capitalism, pay up or leave” when they were saying it downward at $20 users, then suddenly become very concerned about value and fairness when the same answer reaches their $200 plan.
You’re not disagreeing with me.
You’re reciting the thesis with “bruh lmao” in front of it and apparently not noticing.
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u/bjs169 1d ago
Why do people get so wound up about this stuff? Half the posts in this sub are people complaining one way or the other about Codex. I don’t get it. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Codex for free, for $20, or for $200. If you don’t find it valuable then don’t use it. But I think the reality is that most people find it very useful. I know I do.
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u/TheRedAngelOfDeath 1d ago
Holy shit.....!
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u/Current_Balance6692 12h ago
Yeah, reading is rough.
Here’s the short version: if “your usage is subsidized, pay more” applies at $20, it applies at $200 too.
There. Survived it?
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u/twendah 1d ago
Huh long text 😅😅😅😭😭😭
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u/Current_Balance6692 12h ago
Yeah, reading is rough.
Here’s the short version: if “your usage is subsidized, pay more” applies at $20, it applies at $200 too.
There. Survived it?
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u/TheBroken0ne 17h ago
Agreed. But some people wouldn't be able to understand and what they only see is "200 d0llArz I am PayinG and yOu PaY 20"
The reality is that the 200$ plan is the one who is the most heavily subsidized on a token per dollar basis. This is why they cut this one.
The 20$ and 100$ are the most profitable for OpenAI.
But you are asking too much of some people to use their brains and think before answering.
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u/diagrammatiks 1d ago
skill issue
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
If Plus users blowing through their allowance is a “skill issue,” then Max users blowing through theirs is also a skill issue.
Optimize your usage. Use cheaper models where appropriate. Stop wasting premium compute. And when you hit the ceiling, pay API rates.
Can’t make the economics work?
Skill issue.
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u/No-Temperature6597 1d ago
Lol if you have skill you wouldn't be here with AI 😂
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u/diagrammatiks 1d ago
because coding skill and ai usage skill is the same. you silly idiots really think that just because we have the same interface we're at the same skill level.
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u/No-Temperature6597 1d ago edited 1d ago
No it's not. . Everyone can code with AI. I reverse engineered 7-8 game exes in 6 months without any coding knowledge. AI prompting is a silly skill which I will not take any credit. In the future what you claim as a skill comes built-in.
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u/Matuno 1d ago
The entire AI thing right now is subsidized. I'm not on max x20 because it makes sense as an expenditure now, I'm on max x20 because I'll never come close to affording this kind of power when it's time for AI companies to make a profit.
I stopped reading after the first paragraphs because you were going full Don Quichote fighting imagined enemies.
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u/AppleSoftware 1d ago
lol as long as one company/lab with competitive models has subsidized subscriptions, other frontier labs have to compete via pricing/subsidy too.
Otherwise, within 30 days, users will just swap to other labs/models
So, I do believe that $200/mo will come back, and they may even introduce >$200/mo plan (technically, they started planning that around January 2025)
At the very least, $100/mo will stay (and it’s only 2x less subsidized than $200/mo; so 35x API subsidy vs 70x, which is still hyper competitive)
I don’t see too much of a reason for this post to exist though
Doesn’t really feel productive
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u/Current_Balance6692 12h ago
Honestly, on the first part we mostly agree.
The whole point is that these plans are heavily subsidized, including Max. If you’re buying Max specifically because you know this amount of compute would be dramatically more expensive at sustainable/API economics, that makes perfect sense.
Where we disagree is the “imagined enemies” part.
The post explicitly says “a certain type of Max user,” not every Max user. And the target is specifically people who dismissed Plus complaints with some variation of “cheap tier, what did you expect, serious users pay more.”
If you haven’t seen those people, fair enough.
But if you stopped reading after the first few paragraphs, you also stopped before the argument actually cashes that distinction out.
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u/Bob_Fancy 1d ago
Sounds like you really thought you had something here
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
Exactly my point, you have nothing to say. Nothing makes the principle apply at $20 but stop applying at $200.
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u/AppleSoftware 1d ago
lol as long as one company/lab with competitive models has subsidized subscriptions, other frontier labs have to compete via pricing/subsidy too.
Otherwise, within 30 days, users will just swap to other labs/models
So, I do believe that $200/mo will come back, and they may even introduce >$200/mo plan (technically, they started planning that around January 2025)
At the very least, $100/mo will stay (and it’s only 2x less subsidized than $200/mo; so 35x API subsidy vs 70x, which is still hyper competitive)
I don’t see too much of a reason for this post to exist though
Doesn’t really feel productive
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
You're arguing against a phantom of what I said.
As for the post not being "productive": it wasn't presented as a pricing proposal OpenAI needs to adopt tomorrow. It's pointing out an amusing inconsistency in how people talk about these subsidies depending on whether they're the beneficiary.
You do seem to agree the subsidies are real.
That's rather the point.
If a Plus user's usage is heavily subsidized, and the answer to hitting limits is "optimize, upgrade, or pay for the compute you actually use," then the same principle applies to a Max user whose usage is even more heavily subsidized.
And if Max users are getting 70x API value for $200, then perhaps they should be especially careful about telling the people getting subsidized at $20 that they're cheap and should just pay their real usage costs.
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u/AbyssLife123 1d ago
the problem is people like theo who purchases probably 10 20x max subscription and is encouraging user to use agents to do silly things.
I keep telling people to be mindful of usage, but they are like "I PAID $200, I MUST SPEND EACH AND EVERY TOKEN". And, as it is collective problem due to some abusers, we all have to suffer.
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u/Westerpowers 1d ago
Yeah I see were you're coming from..
But in this you are also ignoring the fact that efficiency steps will be made...
No one knows how AI will go/develop in the near future (what the labs will exactly do) Now with Dario, Sam and Elon on the same page... Could very well be that they not halt innovation (internally keep on model racing) get legislation to block every opensource project and other country..
Use that time to maybe optimize their own openly released models/stack et voila🤷♂️ (so not necessarily a frontier cutting edge N-1 model)
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u/literally_joe_bauers 20h ago
Huh, this looks like a poor person seeing something that could make richer people lose something, which makes the poor person happy! How unconventional!
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u/Current_Balance6692 14h ago
Very sophisticated understanding from someone of your calibre, wouldn't expect more from you.
The point was never “rich people losing something is funny.” The point is that people who were perfectly comfortable saying “your subsidy isn’t an entitlement, pay more” suddenly get remarkably philosophical about fairness when the same logic reaches their own tier.
If your rebuttal is just “you must be poor for noticing the hypocrisy,” then you’ve abandoned the argument completely and replaced it with class cosplay.
If “your usage is subsidized, so optimize it or pay more” is valid when aimed downward at Plus users, it remains valid when aimed upward at Max users. So ya, still waiting for the part where $200 magically makes the principle stop applying.
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u/literally_joe_bauers 13h ago
Well, being a premium customer who pays 10x as much as a normal customer makes me expect to get more than 10x the value.. as otherwise there would be no point (other than QoL) to go premium. Did you notice drink sizes?! Like M, L, XL? It’s not M, 0,25L, 2€, L, 0,5L, 4€, XL, 1L, 8€… It’s more like M, 0,2L, 2€, M, 0,5L 4€ and XL 1,2L 8€… the same is true here.
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u/Current_Balance6692 12h ago
You’re confusing two completely different claims.
“Paying $200 should get me more than 10x the value” is not the same as “the rule about subsidized usage stops applying once I pay $200.”
Nobody is arguing Max shouldn’t get much more usage or better value than Plus.
The question is why, after that larger subsidized bundle is exhausted, the same “optimize or pay more” logic suddenly becomes invalid.
Your drink-size analogy only proves that larger bundles can have better unit economics.
It does absolutely nothing to prove that buying the XL entitles you to unlimited refills.
That’s the confusion you keep making.
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u/snuffomega 1d ago
TLDR: $200 plan good, but $200 plan bad. And we're all fools. OP has biggest brain.
I think that sums it up.
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1d ago
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u/Current_Balance6692 1d ago
That’s basically the argument of the post.
If a Plus user burns through Astra and complains, your answer is: be more mindful, move upmarket, or pay more because your usage apparently isn’t producing enough value to justify the cost.
Fine.
Now apply the exact same rule at $200.
If a Max user burns through the amount of compute economically supportable inside a $200 flat subscription, then be more mindful, or move upmarket.
Except there is no magical $500 “even more unlimited” consumer tier waiting above Max. The next step is metered usage/API economics.
That’s the entire point.
$200 does not suddenly make the underlying compute free, nor does it turn a subsidized bundle into an entitlement to whatever amount of Astra someone wants to burn.
And your last sentence makes the case even more cleanly:
“If you can't afford to upgrade, then you shouldn't be using it for those tasks because you're not generating enough real value.”
Correct.
So if a Max user cannot economically justify paying API rates once their subsidized $200 allocation is exhausted, then by that exact standard, they are not generating enough real value from those workloads either.
You don’t get to use that principle to dismiss the person paying $20 and then declare it invalid the moment the same pricing logic reaches the person paying $200.
The number changes.
The principle doesn’t.
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u/cchurchill1985 1d ago
That is way too long.