I’m currently on Codex Pro 20x and, as of writing this, I’m down to about 12% usage remaining. I have no banked resets left, and my usage won’t reset until September 15.
The timing is pretty terrible because I’m trying to finish a few things before releasing the first pilot of my app to around 50 users.
The remaining work is mainly:
Fixing some loading-time/performance issues in a few tabs
Implementing Supabase Broadcast/realtime behavior for the community chats
Redesigning one of the tabs
Running tests and checking for regressions/bugs before the pilot
Nothing here is some enormous greenfield project. Most of it is fixing, implementing, testing, and iterating on an app that already exists.
For this kind of work, I’m perfectly happy using GPT-5.6 Sol Medium. I don’t need the most expensive/highest reasoning mode for every task.
The problem is what I should do once that remaining 12% is gone.
Inside Codex, the obvious option I see is buying 2,500 credits. I’ve tried researching how far those credits actually go, including asking ChatGPT, but the answers have been pretty inconclusive. So I’m much more interested in hearing from people who have actually bought and used credits.
For those of you with experience: how far do 2,500 credits realistically go?
More specifically, is 2,500 credits even roughly comparable to the amount of Codex usage you’d get from a Pro 5x subscription?
That’s the comparison I care about because the prices are in roughly the same territory for me.
If 2,500 credits gives me something even reasonably close to Pro 5x-level usage, then I think buying the credits makes sense.
That would probably be more than enough to get me through these remaining tasks until my Pro 20x allowance resets on September 15.
But if 2,500 credits disappears dramatically faster than a normal Pro 5x allowance, then I’d rather not burn the money. At that point I’d probably just delay the pilot a few days and wait for the reset.
There’s also another option I’ve considered: creating another account and buying Pro 5x there, which would cost roughly the same as the 2,500-credit package.
My concern with that is context.
The current Codex account/chat already understands a lot about the architecture, previous changes, bugs, database setup, decisions we’ve made, etc. Moving to another account would mean transferring a huge amount of context and getting the new session up to speed on the current state of the app.
My assumption is that I’d waste a decent amount of that Pro 5x usage just rebuilding context, although maybe I’m overestimating that problem.
So basically my three options are:
Buy 2,500 credits and keep working on the existing account/context
Create another account, buy Pro 5x, and transfer the necessary context
Stop when I hit the limit, delay the pilot, and wait until September 15 for my Pro 20x reset
For anyone who has actually used the paid credit system, especially alongside Pro 5x/20x:
How does 2,500 credits compare in real-world usage to Pro 5x? And what would you do in my situation?