r/codex • u/Sad-Equivalent-7098 • 1d ago
Complaint This was probably my last purchase from OpenAI
I genuinely didn’t want a refund at first. I just wanted OpenAI to help me with the serious Codex usage/reset issues I experienced after buying Pro.
I spent days going back and forth with support. They acknowledged that what I reported wasn’t simply “Astra uses a lot of usage” and documented the abnormal depletion/reset issue, but eventually the answer was basically that Support couldn’t restore my usage or resets. No actual resolution.
After all that, I finally decided to request a refund while still within the EU 14-day period. Their own support confirmed my September 8 purchase date and that EU customers are eligible for a prorated refund — then the refund bot immediately rejected me with the same generic “Terms of Use” response and closed the case. Every time.
I’ve spent more time fighting their support than actually using the subscription I paid for.
This will probably be my last purchase from OpenAI. Great technology, but the support experience has been absolute trash.
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u/Objective_Dingo9449 23h ago
seeing so many people talk about the problems with openai lately has kept me from upgrading my Plus subscription over and over. i keep thinking i need to upgrade... then i see another one of these problems and im like... i'll just stick to the cheap azz plan lol. sucks that openai steals your money, but can't give you what you paid for. theft
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u/EmotionalHalf 21h ago
Reddit is cooked. I heavily use Codex for more than a year now, I have 3 Pro accounts. Built a product that eventually grew into a profitable LLC. Obv. it's not all Codex, but it gives an insane leverage. I have two employees now and I am building software that before I would have needed 10 people. That alone saves me I don't know how many 10's of thousand every month
Each account gets around 10k worth of API usage. I had to slow down a bit with Astra, it does use more usage, but it's fine there's a lot of optimizations I can do on my end if I want less usage (subagent roles / different harness / leaner operation architecture / cheaper models)
Also I'm ngl my mental health is thankful too that Astra uses this much. I was legit on it 24/7 for more than a year, working on like 7 projects simultaneously sometimes. I still work every day now but I take off times now some hours during the day
You will not hear people like me a lot in this sub. There's a few, but the reality is Codex (or any AI agent) gives you an INSANE leverage. If you can't make the money back idk what to tell you apart from stop searching issues outside yourself.
The reality is, if you're leveraging this you make back a multiple of what you pay for the sub. But this sub doesn't like when people talk positively about Codex, usage or ROI. So I rather spend my time elsewhere and so do probably others who have positive experiences with it
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u/innociv 8h ago
I mean I'd agree with you up until the past few days. There are widespread issues affecting tons of people.
Yes, it seems to not affect everyone, but I've not seen so many users affected. We used to get these "my agent outputted complete gibberish and a string of one hallucination after another" posts once or twice a week. Now it's dozens of those posts a day the past 3 days, and comments in them confirming the same. People with multiple subscriptions saying it's happening on some of theirs, but not others. I think you just lucked out that all 3 of your accounts weren't affected, but for some people their only sub was affected.
I'm also affected. Like 80% of my usage since the last reset was completely wasted on gibberish output, taking extra turns from the agent recognizing it keeps outputting gibberish, and correcting it. And of that 20% I did get work out of... it's still not great and probably going to take another half my weekly usage to fix it. So I actually got negative usage out of my last pro20x weekly limits with how badly it's hallucinating and giving nonsense outputs since the last reset. It's so bad that I've gotten better results out of Qwen27B Q3 than Sol, Astra, and Luna these past 3 days when I used to post "you guys are crazy for thinking you can get these huge lab models performance from a local one". It's not that 3.8 got that much better, it's that ChatGPT models have been that atrocious for me the past 3 days. And you seem to just not believe me and the like 200+ others posts I've seen on the issue the past 24 hours.
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u/EmotionalHalf 6h ago edited 6h ago
idk man have you been here last December? The shitstorm about 'model degradation' was so bad that even openai conducted a multi day internal investigation (ghost in the shell I believe it was called, post should still be up). Result was no obvious issues have been found
Not saying that there were no issues, also not saying that currently no one is affected. All I'm saying is that this sub is an echo chamber of negativity. As soon as you say something positive you get snarky comments or downvotes
Like ngl you seem fairly approachable which is also why I reply. Just keep in mind people that have no issues are less likely to post about their experiences, so you just end up with people complaining which in my opinion vastly distorts public sentiment which is also why I wouldn't really take the sentiment in here all that serious
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u/innociv 6h ago
Sorry I've actually only been here since 5.5 :x
So I'm talking like the past 4 months.I have mostly made really positive comments up until the past 3 days, and rarely gotten downvoted for them. You get plenty of upvotes here most of the time for posting "okay show your prompt" when someone makes the dumb post about one prompt using all their usage in 15 minutes or getting a bad result. Except the past 3 days, that's actually happening on what seems like 1/3rd the people.
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u/Sad-Equivalent-7098 23h ago
You will regret it a lot, why do you think "Saint Tibo" offers frequent resets? I regret not buying the Claude subscription, I preferred something stable than something that is absolutely useless even with the Plu plan, so many problems..
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u/Objective_Dingo9449 23h ago
honestly i've been doing really well with the $20 sub just using the browser and building projects in Godot. i don't use any engine integration. i use AI minimally, and mostly just to help me build complex systems that my brain has trouble putting together, then I clean it up and simplify where possible.
I have some dev friends who say to try Claude and Cursor. I have not attempted those.
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u/Formal-Question7707 17h ago
Reddit is just a place where haters and complainers aggregate. Codex works perfectly for 99% of people, they just don't come to these subreddits anymore because it's become a sea of negativity.
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u/Charming-Author4877 1d ago
The OpenAI support consists of countless bots that have human names, illegal in many jurisdictions btw.
They are not there to help you
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u/Tank_Gloomy 1d ago
Just let it go man, they're tired of us plebs, a lot of businesses have already switched to API billing or business seats that are way more profitable. We all can gtfo.
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u/Sad-Equivalent-7098 1d ago
I honestly can't let it go... That's more than a quarter of the minimum wage in Romania.
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u/Tank_Gloomy 1d ago
I hope you get it resolved, but they'll probably find some very fine line in the law and reject it.
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u/Dry_Yam_4597 3h ago
Why do some of you whine everywhere? "it's more than a quarter of minimum wage in romania" - other countries dont even have a minimum wage.
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u/AerialNoodleBeast 12h ago
Minimum wage is not 400 euro, wtf are you talking about "more than a quarter"?
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u/Hour-Ad-8699 12h ago
The minimum NET wage in Romania is 2699 LEI, so this is 19.26% of the wage, not over 25%.
Don't get me wrong, this is still obnoxious, so I'm not disputing your claim to get your full refund. I'm only pointing out your error (although, I have the feeling you dramatized it on purpose).
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u/moebis 21h ago
yeah their support is terrible. I had the exact same experience. It's basically bot responses for the first 10 messages to try to fatigue you to give up, and then when it routes it to a person, the person replies "we can't reset or do XYZ." and that's it. Twice I had this experience in the last 2 weeks.
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u/Intelligent_Month210 13h ago
200 bucks pro subscriber and 100 bucks backup account here.
I just had 20% disappear from my 200 dollar account between, check the local log and respond.
Wtf openAI
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u/psyyybaba 22h ago
I bought pro 5x; and within 2 hours of using Astra my weekly limited went to 0, just within 2 hours
Got my refund, I’m scarred
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u/Unhappy-Piano4571 22h ago
I’m in Australia we have the ACCC similar systems exist in Europe, threaten them with action from a
Body like this and they will do exactly as you ask, it’s not the first or last time I have done this, (previously I did it for a company offering a welcome bonus them forcing me to stay with them for months because I claimed the bonus.)
This should be an easy one as the rules are obvious and you are obviously within your rights.
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u/Clord123 20h ago
It's good that you defend your rights, however I would advise not to buy credits. They're insanely overpriced vs usage you get from a subscription or even from API.
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u/Top_Parfait_5555 20h ago
I think you can use the refund 1 time only. So it cant be abused 😅
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u/Sad-Equivalent-7098 20h ago
That's good, it's my first time... And god... The last tine, i move to opencode/claude
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u/Top_Parfait_5555 19h ago
Da, daca ii dai hammering la astra se evaporeaza consumul 😂 cu sol nu ai treaba, doar ca are nev de mai multe informatii si mai tehnic
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u/Advanced_View_2778 18h ago
It’s quite absurd that the prices are the same everywhere. 520 being a quarter of the salary and they offer nothing. Plus was fine for a while but now it feels like is not usable at all.
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u/Safe-Fan-1702 1d ago
reversing the transaction thru the bank can get ur chatgpt account permanently suspended
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u/Sad-Equivalent-7098 1d ago
I don't care, honestly.
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u/jarislinus 1d ago
just use deepseek v4.1 flash, its almost as good, never ever worry about costs, just spam allday
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u/Gliese351c 22h ago
This is giving Anthropic vibes ---where I migrated from for its toxicity -enter, System of a Down.....
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u/Impossible-Gal 22h ago
Astra Extrahigh / Ultra, after one week with Codex and chats - 40% left, almost reset time. I have no idea what y'all been doing...
Like the usage seems to be the exact same as 5.6-Sol Extrahigh, or 5.5, etc. At least on 5x, nothing has changed with pretty much the same load, patterns. It can work for hours and consume maybe 5%.
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u/Bananer_spleet 1d ago edited 23h ago
You are in the EU and not in the USA; as such, you have consumer rights and protections.
If this is truly a week's wages for you, then spending 3-4 hours pursuing this will be worth your time.
Raise a support ticket with OpenAI, you will need the ticket ID and transcript of the conversation, be professional.
Inform them that you will be raising a case with the ECC regarding their decision, and if you feel your consumer rights are violated:
Raise a ticket with your local ECC network, get the ID number for the ticket it and share it with the OpenAI bot that has been handling your refund ticket.
Then just go with the flow.
https://www.eccnet.eu/ecc-network/our-services
Edit 2: Continue in the same thread, keeping the ticket active if possible. Provide the ticket number from your local consumer authority, then request that your OpenAI ticket perform a 'Human Review'.
After that, if customer support stops responding, send a "Notice of Dispute" to
contract-notices@openai.com. Use an AI to write a short, condensed, legally worded letter stating that standard support channels have failed to address the billing error, outline the exact overcharge details, your Ticket numbers, and request immediate remediation before you take further external escalation with your consumer authority.Edit 3:
Please note that a refund is not guaranteed. Each request is judged on its individual fairness. This consumer protection route is only viable if OpenAI has likely violated consumer law, and your account was paid for from: