Comment by Aurornis
3 days ago
> I recently bought the $200/mo OpenAI subscription but could barely use 10% of it
This entire comment is confusing. Why are you buying the $200/month plan if you’re only using 10% of it?
I rotate providers. My comment above applies to all of them. It really depends on the work you’re doing and the codebase. There are tasks where I can get decent results and barely make the usage bar move. There are other tasks where I’ve seen the usage bar jump over 20% for the session before I get any usable responses back. It really depends.
I got it to try Atlas, their agentic browser, before it was open to Plus users. I convinced myself that I could use the additional capacity to multi-task and push through hard core problems without worrying about quota limits.
For context, this was a few months ago when GPT 5 was new and I was used to constantly hitting o3 limits. It was an experiment to see if the higher plan could pay for itself. It most certainly can but I realized that I just don’t need it. My workflow has evolved into switching between different agents on the same project. So now I have much less of a need for any one.
To use up the Pro tier plan you must close the loop so to speak - so that Codex knows how to test the quality of its output and incrementally inch toward its goals. This can be harder or easier depending on your project.
You should also queue up many "continue ur work" type messages.
I’m actively doing that for a fun side project - systematically rewriting SQLite in Rust. The goal is to preserve 100% compatibility, quirks and all. First I got it to run the native test harness, and now it’s basically doing TDD by itself. Have to say, with regular check-ins, it works quite well.
Note: I’m using the $20 plan for this! With codex-5.2-medium most of the time (previously codex-5.1-max-medium). For my work projects, Gemini 3 and Antigravity Claude Opus 4.5 are doing the heavy lifting at the moment, which frees up codex :) I usually have it running constantly in a second tab.
The only way I can now justify Pro is if I am developing multiple parallel projects with codex alone. But that isn’t the case for me. I am happier having a mix of agents to work with.
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Not the same poster, but apparently they tried the $200/mo subscription, but after seeing they don't need it, they "subscribed to all three at their lowest subscriptions (for $60/mo)" instead.
> but apparently they tried the $200/mo subscription, but after seeing they don't need it
This is why it’s confusing, though. Why start with the highest plan as the starting point when it’s so easy to upgrade?
Because you’re rich?
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> I rotate providers. My comment above applies to all of them. It really depends on the work you’re doing and the codebase. There are tasks where I can get decent results and barely make the usage bar move. There are other tasks where I’ve seen the usage bar jump over 20% for the session before I get any usable responses back. It really depends.
Ah, I missed this part. Yes, this is basically what I would recommend today as well. Buy a couple of different frontier model provider basic subscriptions. See which works better on what problems. For me, I use them all. For someone else it might be codex alone. Ymmv but totally worth exploring!