Per‑account Codex use fell
One analyst reported typical Codex usage per account dropped from around $900/month last year to about $20/month now, and also cited GPT‑5.4 input pricing at roughly $2.50 per million tokens. (Thomas Forschbach) (x.com)
A market analyst said typical monthly Codex spend per account has fallen from about $900 last year to about $20 now. (x.com) Thomas Forschbach made the claim in a post on X and paired it with a current OpenAI list price of $2.50 per 1 million input tokens for GPT‑5.4. OpenAI’s API pricing page shows GPT‑5.4 at $2.50 per 1 million input tokens, $0.25 for cached input, and $15 for output. (x.com) (openai.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent for writing features, fixing bugs, answering questions about a codebase, and proposing pull requests. OpenAI launched the cloud-based Codex research preview in May 2025 and said each task runs in its own sandboxed environment loaded with a repository. (openai.com) OpenAI moved Codex from a stand-alone developer tool toward a broader product bundled into ChatGPT plans and API usage. Its current pricing page says Codex is included in Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Edu, and Enterprise plans, with API-key users paying token-based rates. (developers.openai.com) That shift changes what “usage per account” can mean. A $900 monthly bill points to heavy metered use or enterprise-style usage, while a $20 figure lines up with OpenAI’s current Plus plan price and a much wider base of lighter users. (developers.openai.com) (openai.com) OpenAI also cut the distance between its general models and its coding models over the past year. The Codex pricing page now lists GPT‑5.4 and GPT‑5.3‑Codex together in the product, and OpenAI’s changelog says the Codex model picker now includes GPT‑5.4, GPT‑5.4‑mini, GPT‑5.3‑Codex, and GPT‑5.2. (developers.openai.com 1) (developers.openai.com 2) OpenAI’s product cadence helps explain the drop in per-account spend. After the May 16, 2025 research preview, the company shipped general availability on October 6, 2025, then added a desktop app in February 2026 and broader “Codex for almost everything” features on April 16, 2026. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) (openai.com 3) (openai.com 4) OpenAI has not publicly confirmed Forschbach’s $900-to-$20 account-level comparison in the sources reviewed here. What it has published is a product lineup with lower entry prices, bundled access, and token-based billing that can spread usage across many more accounts than Codex had in its early rollout. (x.com) (developers.openai.com) (openai.com)
