OAI really trying to push folks to either the ad infested tier for gen chat (ChatGPT Go) or Pro ($100/month) for code.
I guess the $20 Plus plan is the red-headed step child now.
Meanwhile, Z.ai coder is what…$9/month? Hmmm.
I don’t have a local rig powerful enough to natively run a good coder (Qwen 3 next), but “I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further” is THE perfect use case for running your shit locally.
PS: It looks like Pro and Plus tiers have gone up a smidge too? Eg: last I checked they were $20 and $100; they now show $30 and $155. I cancelled my account so OAI gifted me a free month (lol) but seriously…fuck that.
It’s not entirely unexpected, all the AI companies have been heavily subsidising inference to get customers.
I don’t use Codex but I’ve been experimenting with ECA and I can track my token API costs across Gemini and Anthropic. I’m mostly using Gemini and a heavy days usage would be £1.50 in API costs and I’m certainly not doing that every day. I have to wonder if these Codex users are conscious of how many tokens they are burning underneath or just YOLOing everything until the computer says no?
ECA allows you to mix and match models to sub-agents and I could certainly see me offloading some tasks like code exploration to a locally hosted models and saving the expensive reasoning tokens for planning.
PS: Just to let you know - ECA is fucking amazing! Thank you VERY much for that. I’m currently using Sonnet 4.6 via OpenRouter API to boss around my local Qwen3-4… so far so good :)
Right now, I can see -
Sonnet 4.6 API is not too bad at all at moment
GLM 5.1 is STUPID cheap for what it is (promo?)
And Gemma 4 31B is just taking the piss
(or FREE via Google…but you know…ZDR)
Absolutely true. If I had to pull a number out of thin air, I’d say they were still probably under-charging what it actually costs them to run these things by an order of magnitude or two. So right now, Codex pro costs $150…but in a year or two? $300-400 or even $500? I can see them slowly ratcheting it up. It’s the same old story we’ve seen played out before (eg: Uber, Spotify, Netflix etc).
Doesn’t mean it’s one we should particularly want to see repeat tho.
Like you, I like the notion of mixing and matching local agents for grunt work and off-loading the thinking to API or SOTA. I hadn’t heard of ECA - that looks like it’s right up my alley. Thanks for that