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Comment by sireat | Hacker News Reader

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable.

I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan.

Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours.

I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not much reduction in the token allowance.

I generally write a detailed spec before plan then possibly iterate a bit before implementation. Not sure what I am doing "wrong".

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Yeah, Codex basically gives me unlimited tokens for my use-case under the Pro plan. Just keep it the same price and keep or increase usage limits and I'm quite happy.

This lets me mess around with random experiments as I "catch up" on how to find various (mostly silly) uses for the technology.

That and much less worry about being banned without warning for not using approved harnesses as I try random stuff is a giant plus as well.

I assume they have lots of spare compute and less demand than Anthropic as it's obvious they are subsidizing my usage for now. But it lets me start off with "giant context window" type playgrounds which give immediate moderate effectiveness, then I can figure out how to tighten it up and reduce token burn from there.

In contrast, I’m on the $200 max plan for Codex and I hit the 5 hour limit near daily at work. I typically am having it work on about 5 tasks an hour. I’ve never hit a 5 hour limit on Claude on the $200 plan but I have hit my weekly limit.

What models?

>As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable.

I imagine they track usage and can see whether their habitual users are switching to something else and aren't going to slash prices 'for the hell of it'.

just look at public stats on openrouter (obviously not indicative of first party app usage or direct api usage, but there's a huge difference between these graphs): https://openrouter.ai/openai https://openrouter.ai/anthropic

Oh wow deepseek is on par in usage with anthropic: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek

Deepseek has been on a growth spurt recently. Openai is at half and looks almost flat in comparison to anthropic and deepseek.

Is it that surprising given Deepseek is great enough for most use cases (like implementation) and prices are off by an order of magnitude?

DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.098/$0.196 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.435/$0.87

v/s

Anthropic: Claude Haiku $1/$5 Anthropic: Claude Sonnet $3/$15 Anthropic: Claude Opus $5/$25

Many people (me included) sometimes use Opus-class models to plan then swap to Deepseek and/or local models for implementation. The real AI war is in the pricing/performance ratio, and it doesn't look like any of the US-based models are winning on that front.

Just because I don't personally know anyone using deepseek. I'm in northern europe. I can imagine there's a big huge chunk of the world that is priced out of using openai or anthropic, and I'm blind to it because of where I am.

I can use DeepSeek in 80% of my tasks. Let's see how the latest kimi 2.7 helps, because this is even cheaper than deepseek, and supposedly even better. So far it's not worse.

One token of GPT seems to go farther than an opus token in my experience, those books are a little cooked

It sounds like the problem is signing customers in the first place.

I literally never hit usage limits in Claude Code on the $100 plan, and I feel like I'm using it as heavily as I can while still producing useful software. I could certainly make thinky machine go burr by giving it more busy work, but it wouldn't be good code or code that needs to exist.

And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was now counted at regular API rates, but that doesn't seem to ever run out either. I do only run one at a time, though...not parallel, so maybe it doesn't kick over into some "automation" mode of counting usage, I dunno.

> And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was now counted at regular API rates, but that doesn't seem to ever run out either.

The billing change starts 15 June:

https://zed.dev/blog/anthropic-subscription-changes

(Couldn't find a direct Claude link that wasn't a Twitter tweet (what is with AI platforms making announcements on that fElon-owned platform?!), so the Zed one seemed best.)

Ah, that explains it. I guess I'll see it show up as separate usage pretty soon. Or, I'll find an alternative for that role (though Opus is clearly better than DeepSeek or MiMo or any other cheaper large model I've tried).

I regularly hit usage limits on CC but thats when im in the zone, and do 5 things in parallel. Thats like 5 hours a week.

I also hit limits if I do something important, at which point I make it do a loop with significant subagent counts to just review and adjust the code extensively using a bunch of frameworks. Im perfectly happy with the CC limits of a max plan, it is never something that blocks me.and when it runs out im brain fried as well anyway so thats not an issue.

I agree, anecdotally I've only hit any usage limits on the $100 Max plan in the past couple of days using Fable 5. Evaluating old codebases eats a lot of tokens. But before Fable 5 I was running Opus 4.8 on max effort most of the day and rarely getting close to 50% usage. I rarely run dynamic workflows and sub-agents though.

I used 80% of my 5h anthropic usage window on a code review using fable. I tried this twice on two different feature implementations. Same result.

Claude also just updated their privacy policy so they can shove a "please verify your identity" reply in your face after they flag your chat for "malicious activity". This is already common practice with Codex.

And how does this compare to openai which is an ad company now? I am interested in trying codex but I want to know how my data will be used for ads or measurement and training data if I become a paid subscriber. And what happens to that data when I stop subscribing?

my comment was not an endorsement of codex. when I said "also" I was referring to openai as the other problematic company :)

Do you know the money these places are burning through?

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