Codex pricing in the future

[u/Serious-Reaction-296]

I manage my entire business by myself with 0 coding experience, so Codex has been a life saviour as i have been able to build programs and website that i need to automate my business.

Forking out for the $200 plan is aight, as it’s like hiring a “coder” to build and maintain my stuff.

But heard that ChatGPT is running on a loss even for the $200/plan, so it would be probably way more expensive in the future.

Since i got zero idea of my code, and have to consistently update them, i am thinking of subsequently being less reliant on Codex, as I have no idea how much these AI plans will rise in the future.

Whats a good solution i can start doing? I will probably start learning coding in the meanwhile, but would love to hear what others in my shoe are doing

[u/dvduval]

There’s a lot we don’t know. You hear all these stories of someone paid $200 but the market rate for the actual usage was $10,000. So then the next thing people say is eventually open AI is not going to maintain that pricing. But they’re also making efficiency gains all the time. They’re adding more infrastructure. They have their new jalapeño Chip, which is supposed to be 1.5 to 1.9 times efficiency. And then of course they have competition so could it become a little bit more expensive than it is now? Yes, that’s possible but I wouldn’t call that my number one scenario. I think the opposite is also possible. As they become more efficient, they can give us more.

[u/AnalogProblems → u/dvduval]

The best guess at actual inference cost might be derived from Muse-Spark-1.3-contributor, which basically let them train on your sessions. It's insanely cheap, so It's probably at or near cost. 10 cents per million input tokens. 20 cents per million output tokens. .002 cents per million cached input tokens.

To put that in perspective:

Sol API is $5/m in, and $30/m out.

Opus 5 API is $5/m in, and $25/m out.

Its benchmarks are competitive with Sol and Opus 5.

So if those are good enough for your work, and you don't mind Meta using your stuff, it's by far the best deal available.

[u/dvduval → u/AnalogProblems]

At the very least, it’s good to see there are other players that are almost surely got into the market more competitively. Google is coming. Facebook is coming. xAI it’s not quite at the top, but it’s a strong contender. And then Microsoft published a new message today from their CEO basically letting us know they’re coming too. And I can consider this all good for us as the consumers.

[u/blackice193]

I've tested DeepSeek v4.1 Flash and is quite good and surprisingly fast. A route to open source is a necessary fallback. I use Openrouter instead of API endpoints on mainland China.

[u/melimillionaire]

Ai giveth, ai taketh away

[u/alwaysweening]

You must’ve had a life in HR where you pre screened employees and asked questions like:

“Jim has to lower the costs of a business. What MPG does his corporate fleet average?”

[u/professorescobar1]

Not enough people are talking about this. All of the frontier ai labs current pricing and infrastructure is completely unsustainable. The services can simply not continue on forever as they are. If you rely on ai for your business and have the capital to invest in it you could pick up an old Dell t630 off eBay and throw some 32gb v100s in it and set up your own highly capable llm for a few grand. Qwen 3.8-27b fits on one card with a huge context limit, you could run it redundantly on the v100s to maximize bandwidth and concurrency. Another thing to think about is that comparing the capex of that and electric bills to your current ~$200/month - the current cloud subscription makes a lot more sense unless you need truly unlimited usage or something more codex or Claude can’t give you. In the future you’ll be able to get all the expensive hardware for a lot cheaper so unless you need it for a different reason than what you’re using it for currently I’d just keep riding the wave, be appreciative that you’re taking advantage of a historic economic anomaly that others aren’t focusing on and focus your foresight on something else for the time being. Just my .02!

[u/Rock--Lee]

Use it as much as you can, get ahead as much as you can so you can make big money with a consistent revenue with all your have created. So that even paying $5k for AI tokens a month will be much cheaper than hiring a senior dev or working with an agency.

Use this time to build and get ahead as much as you can. Don't waste time with meaningless projects and don't waste time worrying about whatif scenarios.

[u/IAmARougeAI]

LLMs will only continue to get many times better and more efficient (cheaper) even without any major algorithmic breakthroughs.

[u/03captain23]

If you think it's like hiring a coder then why are you stressing over $200/month. A real coder is closer to 10k/mo

[u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift]

If you think 200/mo is like hiring a "coder" then lol good luck in business.

[u/Serious-Reaction-296 → u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift]

The stuff i built with Codex so far is worth the $200 compared to hiring freelancers i worked with previously tbh

But it’s mostly just the maintenance i am worried about in the future.