OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users

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MMC995 about 5 hours ago 111 commentsRead Article on 9to5mac.com

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Discussion (111 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

phyzome•about 4 hours ago

"During this period, the company also reset users’ weekly usage early on several occasions to celebrate milestones"

Such a casino vibe.

vatsachak•about 4 hours ago

Hey I work in the casino industry and we have regulations!

F7F7F7•about 4 hours ago

Both OpenAI and Anthropic use a lot of casino/slot machine mechanics in their TUIs and Apps so likely intentional.

TomJansen•about 4 hours ago

Do you have any examples of this? I am not sure if I understand what you mean

derwiki•about 4 hours ago

I think the whole nature of agentic programming is variable reward: kick off a bunch of prompts, obsessively check “which one nailed it??” Or at least I get a dopamine hit when the agents notifies me that it’s done with its turn.

pelagicAustral•about 3 hours ago

I don't really know if really fits the description, but the whole effort (`\effort`) gate is pretty on point. I mean, you can go up to Ultracode which takes over the whole bottom portion of the terminal with a shiny glow, Ultracode for sure give a lot of "up the ante" vibes...

matheusmoreira•about 3 hours ago

Timers. Such as these five hour and seven day limits.

If you see any sort of timer anywhere, you are in a Skinner's box simulator. You are being subjected to positive and negative reinforcement via the reward schedule. This is habit forming.

svachalek•about 3 hours ago

It's a little more like App Store "gems" imo, with some clarity and honesty removed. Pay for "usage" that disappears arbitrarily: coded that bug fix for you, 3% usage consumed. Would you like to upgrade your plan to pro for "more" usage or max for "much more" usage? Buy pro max for "most" usage and access to our latest model, until we revoke it 15 minutes from now.

algoth1•about 4 hours ago

When there’s billions involved everything is intentional

matheusmoreira•about 3 hours ago

It's the gacha of software development.

palmotea•about 4 hours ago

>> During this period, the company also reset users’ weekly usage early on several occasions to celebrate milestones, including adding another million active users across the two (now unified) platforms.

> Such a casino vibe.

No no no! It means we're all in it together! Feel the parasocial vibes!

tom1337•about 4 hours ago

also it sounds like users benefit but they mostly don't. resets mostly benefitted OpenAI and only gave users few additionals hours.

bko•about 4 hours ago

I think it's great that oai resets users limits. What is this complaint?

Free drinks? Keep customers happy? Reward your heaviest users? Casino vibes

venzaspa•about 2 hours ago

I used to think it was pretty great but now it just means you can't plan your usage across the week.

It's a slightly entitled complaint but when you 'waste' 80% of your remaining usage because you get a reset you weren't expecting, there's a ping of disappointment there.

bko•about 1 hour ago

If you don't like it just ignore it. You're just trying to game the system and extract the absolute most you can and you're upset that this thwarts your game and doesn't benefit you. People like you are why we can't have nice things

wccrawford•about 3 hours ago

I've seen a lot of people who seem to think it's inevitable that they'll get resets, making them more likely to over-spend early because they'll get a reset anyhow.

It could leave them out of availability later when they need it.

vatsachak•about 3 hours ago

I think there can be many complaints about large scale AI providers but given that large companies are now pushing for local models it seems that we are luckily avoiding the situation where AI is a utility

jchw•about 3 hours ago

Well, you know what they say. The first one's free.

bko•about 1 hour ago

When did hn turn into reddit?

qsort•about 3 hours ago

They now give out resets you can choose when to use, but with a "best before" date. With Anthropic you don't even know what model you'll have access to next week. A few months ago I wanted to try a subscription to Gemini but I couldn't figure out how to give them money. The other one thinks he's Mecha Hitler.

To an extent I get it, this is not like a normal SaaS where you just buy seats, but their commercial offerings, especially B2C ones, feel like complete amateur hour. If they were selling literally anything else I'd have ran for the hills a long time ago.

bpodgursky•about 4 hours ago

The vibe was people goofing around on Twitter. There's one guy making the call and the reset is kind of a meme.

mannanj•about 4 hours ago

Yeah. I switched to codex 1.5 months ago to try it, and for some reason the "vibe" kept me here. It was really the unpredictable rewards from the constant resets though. I am not convinced it's a better product or that sol + any combination of luna is better than Claude.

I'll be switching back.

fau•about 5 hours ago

> This is necessary as (a) the 5h limit allows us to smoothen the load on our compute, allowing to keep the plan generous in terms of weekly usage

Seems fair, but then maybe the 5h usage should also drain slower during off-peak hours? Perhaps it already does.

> and (b) users on the Plus plan are relatively casual and new users, but then also just accidentally eat through their whole weeks usage and then are confused, making it not a great experience.

Wouldn't this one be fixed by making the 5h limit a guardrail you can opt out of? If so, then this doesn't work as justification for a mandatory limit.

bootlooped•about 5 hours ago

Also, I want to be able to eat through my whole week's usage at once. What if I was busy all week and want to work on my personal project(s) Saturday or Sunday.

dcrazy•about 3 hours ago

That is a pathological use case for OpenAI, and precisely why they have instituted these limits. Part of the tradeoff of doing your work on someone else’s computer is they get to set the rules about when you use it.

watwut•about 2 hours ago

How is that pathological? It sounds like a completely normal behavior.

GolfPopper•about 3 hours ago

It feels like daily quests in MMOs, trying to force user engagement via cultivating addiction-style behavior patterns

svachalek•about 3 hours ago

Come back tomorrow so you can raise your faction reputations another 0.00001%!

cactusplant7374•about 5 hours ago

There are no off-peak hours. I have received the model overloaded error that cancels my current goal during the early hours of the morning.

out_of_protocol•about 4 hours ago

> early hours of the morning

which TZ?

> There are no off-peak hours.

Probably US west coast hours, but there's no public stats

cactusplant7374•about 3 hours ago

2AM CST

mbreese•about 3 hours ago

I’ve been hit with limits at 4am Eastern time when I’d expect for not a lot to be going on. I always thought the quotas would be used best for shaping demand curves, but as you said — there are no off-peak hours anymore.

LaurensBER•about 5 hours ago

Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan this effectively introduces the 5h limits again for all corporate users.

At this point the 40 USD/120 USD Cursor Team subscription suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. You'll get more generous limits and a single monthly limit.

evandena•about 4 hours ago

Premium seats are coming soon.

https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/

trollbridge•about 5 hours ago

Based on the ads flooding me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and anywhere else I see ads, Cursor is really going after this market right now.

stavros•about 5 hours ago

I'm curious about why you see ads, I didn't think anyone on HN does, nowadays. Given how easy it is to install uBlock, is it a conscious decision to browse adfully?

oldmanhorton•about 3 hours ago

Some of us don’t use an adblocker because we are aware that ads are how most websites get paid for on the internet. I pay for sites I care to support, but for something like LinkedIn, I’d rather have their monetization scheme push me away from any usage than block the ads and make the site slightly more palatable.

walthamstow•about 4 hours ago

I don't think that many people here voluntarily go on Facebook either

rob•about 4 hours ago

Why not? I owe my life to ads. Thank you Google AdSense and Yahoo! Ads for the hundreds of thousands of dollars you paid for 16 year old Rob to slap them on his MySpace layout website in 2006 so Timmy could put a glitter graphic of Stone Cold Steve Austin on his banner.

rob•about 4 hours ago

> Given that it's not possible to buy the USD 100,- or USD 200,- subscription on a team/corporate plan

https://openai.com/index/premium-seats-chatgpt-business/

flimflamm•about 4 hours ago

So we must move to 5 hour working days. Thanks OpenAI!

pzo•about 4 hours ago

probably less - I sometimes manage to burn like most of my 5h credits on Claude 5x Max plan in 2h.

The annoying things is that you gave bigger tasks and is such session finished maybe 70% and after 5h pool resets cache will expire so that if you "please continue" it will wipe out again a lot of your 5h pool)

cute_boi•about 3 hours ago

Lets normalize working 5 hours a day. :)

OsrsNeedsf2P•about 5 hours ago

https://codex-resets.com/

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

The reset cadence is absurd.

LetMeLogin•about 4 hours ago

I really don't mind blowing my weekly usage in one day, but getting my tasks stopped and waiting for 5h cap to finish - is just annoying.

benmorris•about 3 hours ago

This sucks, but really the value of the $20 plan has been insane. I routinely get weeks of work out of the weekly limit, so yeah I'll just move up plans if needed.

harrisoned•about 3 hours ago

It will get worse!

Tighter limits, forcing people to higher plans. Most will go as they are addicted and dependent on those tools. They need to use to finish the project they started as no human will touch that pile of code. If you didn't saw this coming, as it has been the standard business strategy from all kinds of SaaS in the last years, you haven't been paying attention.

Gareth321•about 3 hours ago

There are solid, cheap options like xAI, z.AI, MiniMax, Kimi, DeepSeek, and Alibaba. Heck, I can run a coding agent on my 32GB MacBook Pro M1 right now and it's actually pretty good (just slow). No one is forced to keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic. That's their major strategic risk: distilled models are far cheaper to build and run and they're only a few months behind.

danielpassy•about 5 hours ago

This is such a bummer for those of us living in third world countries. I’m not a casual user, I just can’t afford to pay more.

estebarb•about 4 hours ago

Personally I have been using Deepseek V4 flash and it is enough for my needs. You can use OpenCode Zen/Go and also get access to many other models, including OpenAI ones. Writing purpose specific agents can make cheaper models close the intelligence gap with the most expensive ones

dgellow•about 4 hours ago

Aren’t you better using other services than OpenAI if the price matters to you?

danielpassy•about 4 hours ago

I’ve tried Claude Code and recently switched to Codex. I’ve found that $20 on Codex gets me 4–5 times more usage than on Claude Code.

I could burn through my Opus usage in 1 hour whereas with Sol, I can go 3–4 days.

F7F7F7•about 4 hours ago

Oolama? That plan is more than generous for $20.

usef-•about 4 hours ago

You might be thinking of API pricing? The subscriptions give you a lot.

dgellow•about 4 hours ago

Oh right, thanks for catching that

ReptileMan•about 3 hours ago

There are many providers and harnesses. You could go almost 90% of the frontier models for the fraction of the price. You have 3 more free days of ox alpha.

Geofencing has been quite good at creating feeling of being ripped off in the developed countries - from which the bulk of the companies revenue come from - that companies seems to be dropping it lately.

Anyway - China's advances seems to have caught the big 2 unprepared, so price war seems to be going on.

And there are Chinese resellers for frontier models if you are desperate for high end frontier tokens.

hemkeshr•about 2 hours ago

Imagine being a student and using codex for some night studies and hit the limit at the wrong time saying let's continue after exams, still we have normal chat available. Maybe for projects also but we still have no limits in normal chat section but that ain't codex for working on our projects.

datakan•about 4 hours ago

I left Claude because of this. I guess now I need to move on from OpenAI also

wobbat•about 4 hours ago

But where will you go?

rrr_oh_man•about 3 hours ago

I really don’t get why people use the native chat apps when you can use all models via their APIs with no restrictions.

It’s more expensive, yes, but I assume most people here use it for something that is worth spending money on?

vecter•about 3 hours ago

From my rough understanding, tokens are about five to ten times more expensive than the prepaid plans

dcrazy•about 3 hours ago

It seems you’ve stumbled into the truth: a lot of things are only worth throwing LLMs at as long as the LLMs are cheap.

ok123456•about 3 hours ago

Chinese models.

F7F7F7•about 4 hours ago

I see this as evidence that last weeks token burn rate wasn’t by accident or due to some “bug.”

I don’t mind the 5 hour window but this is a reminder to not hinge your workflows on any one tool.

dgellow•about 4 hours ago

I’m not a user myself but find it not great for your customers to announce such a change for the next day. Cannot they announce a few days in advance?

mostertoaster•about 3 hours ago

Is there a world where we look back at how AI usage is charged today and we equate it with how we had minutes on AOL and how absurd it seems looking back?

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

Absolutely. LLM providers are likely to be the next telecom providers. Low and steady income, translating to safe dividend income for investors. Most of these companies have no moat, since most LLM implementation strategies more or less converge to the same result.

sidrag22•about 3 hours ago

I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.

However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.

y1n0•about 3 hours ago

Not when you consider the sheer amount of compute to calculate a single token. Today, at least.

Maybe if we have some breakthrough in how to get equivalent ai capacity out of less compute it’ll seem crazy in retrospect.

But the magnitude of flops per token on SOTA models is mind boggling huge.

joshstrange•about 1 hour ago

Absolutely. Tokens will flow like electricity, in the instances when you aren't just paying for electricity to run models locally. The token providers (well, at least the frontier labs) will fight it tooth-and-nail with the example of telecoms being "how to become a commodity" but as long as open models continue they will have no choice.

Any other outcome would be pretty terrible.

dcrazy•about 3 hours ago

AOL minutes seem antiquated, but not absurd.

AlwaysRock•about 3 hours ago

Eventually.

rfgplk•about 2 hours ago

If OpenAI were actually serious about capturing marketshare they'd release an unlimited subscription plan. Rate limit users if you need to, but let people use their agents 24/7. Even at $1000/month most would take it.

rrr_oh_man•about 3 hours ago

Stupid question: Why are y'all not using the API? It’s more expensive, but you can do what you want.

emehex•about 3 hours ago

> It's more expensive

There's your answer

rrr_oh_man•about 3 hours ago

Man, that was my instinct too, but I’m not sure.

I don’t think everyone here is using Claude/GPT/… to create indie games?

If you’re using it for work then waiting another week/day/hour is a business expense, effectively.

Maybe it's like this guy I know who purchased a new-ish Bugatti but all the service is done by a local mechanic, during his time off, in a barn.

phiresky•about 3 hours ago

I think you're underestimating the "more expensive". It's not a 30% discount or similar. API is at least 10 times more expensive (own experience), ~40x as expensive if [1] is accurate.

At that price difference, lots of things that are viable to do in whatever harness the subscription allows are simply impractical via API, you'd be spending a whole developer's salary just for the benefit of using a different harness.

I tried for example Deepseek V4 Pro for a bit (via API pricing), but it's _more expensive_ than Sol via subscription, even though $1.7/Mtok is a lot less than 20$/Mtok.

[1]: https://tibotattle.com/

rfgplk•about 1 hour ago

API costs are simply too high. If you go wild you can easily burn $3-5k a day. If you really hammer it (ie going full parallel agentic) you can exceed $10-20k. And this isn't even going crazy. Those costs are simply too high to make any sense.

Alifatisk•about 3 hours ago

Maybe I should go back to ChatGPT again and copy-paste code.

sowrabh•about 4 hours ago

I can understand Plus to some extent but why would Work users be considered casual or new?

tarr11•about 5 hours ago

No point in using /fast mode if you are gonna get stopped after 5 hours.

joshstrange•about 1 hour ago

Fast mode doesn't use subscription usage (IIRC) so it's not going to be limited to 5hr.

honestlyranked•about 5 hours ago

I say its good because you can atleast have a break in between sessions

somenameforme•about 4 hours ago

Haha. I've been pretty happy using similar limits on Claude precisely for this. It provides a really nice work:life balance without that nagging feeling that I should really get a few more hours in.

janilowski•about 4 hours ago

Tragic day in AI.

datakan•about 4 hours ago

The most transformative technology ever created! Brought to you in 5 hour increments..... maybe

tanseydavid•about 3 hours ago

They are conditioning us for the soon-to-come electricity brown-outs. </only half joking>

m3kw9•about 3 hours ago

Unlocking the weekly limit coming soon for $9.99.

hno8a34nwn•about 4 hours ago

Honestly didn't expect that

BrucecarlL•about 4 hours ago

Please don’t! Don’t limit my daily usage

q8zd3•about 4 hours ago

Imagine paying for this shit..