Codex pricing 2026: plans $0–$500, and a credit costs $0.04

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How much does Codex cost?

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Codex pricing doesn’t exist as a line item of its own. Codex is bundled into whatever ChatGPT plan you are already on, which means the honest answer to “what does Codex cost” is “whatever your ChatGPT plan costs, plus whatever you spend when you run out.”

That second half is new, and it is the part most pricing pages still miss.

If you pay	You get
$0, free tier	GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app, hard stop when you hit the limit
$8, Go	Lightweight coding on the same model, still a hard stop
$20, Plus	The realistic entry point, and the first tier that can buy credits
$100, $200 or $500, Pro	More usage at each step; Ultrafast only at $500
$20 per user, Business	Annual billing; $25 if you pay monthly

Not set on Codex yet? Five alternatives and what each one costs are further down.

The number that matters most isn’t on that table. When I first checked in August 2026, OpenAI’s own help centre stated that Codex “costs ~$100-$200/developer per month”, on a product whose entry paid tier is $20. That was the vendor’s estimate, not mine, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you budget. It is the same shape as what Claude Code costs: a headline tier that badly under-describes the bill.

What changed in Codex pricing on 2 April 2026

Codex used to bill by the message. It now bills by the token.

OpenAI’s rate card documents the switch plainly: “On Apr 2, 2026, we updated Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message pricing.” A second wave on 23 April pulled in the remaining Enterprise, Edu, Health, Gov and Teachers plans.

This matters more than a billing-mechanics footnote, because it changes what you can predict. Under per-message pricing you could count your messages and roughly forecast your month. Under token pricing, two messages that look identical can differ by an order of magnitude depending on how much context you dragged in and how much output the model produced.

There are two further changes that get folded into that one constantly, including by me until I checked the release notes, and the dates are worth separating:

Date	What actually changed
30 October 2025	Plus and Pro users can buy credits at their limit instead of waiting
10 March 2026	Auto top-up — credits bought for you when your balance drops
2 April 2026	Credits repriced by token rather than by message

Only the last of the three is a pricing-mechanics change. The first is the one that ended Codex’s best feature as a budgeting instrument, and it is nine months old.

That matters because the old story — repeated across most of the published guides, and published by me in my Codex versus Claude Code retest — is that Codex has a ceiling and simply stops. On Plus and Pro it hasn’t since October 2025. It offers to sell you credits, and with auto top-up enabled it buys them for you.

OpenAI Codex pricing at a glance

Every figure below comes from OpenAI’s Codex pricing page, re-checked on 26 October 2026.

Plan	Price	What you’re buying
Free	$0/mo	GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app
Go	$8/mo	Lightweight coding, same model as Free
Plus	$20/mo	Web, CLI, IDE and iOS; code review and Slack; GPT-6.1 Sol
Pro $100	$100/mo	More usage than Plus; no five-hour limit
Pro $200	$200/mo	More usage than Pro $100
Pro $500	$500/mo	The most usage, plus Ultrafast mode
Business	$20/user/mo	Annual billing, 2+ users; $25 billed monthly
Enterprise / Edu	Contact sales	Priority processing, audit logs, data residency controls
API key	Standard API rates	No subscription; bills per token

Two notes on that table that the summaries tend to flatten.

“Pro from $100” is genuinely three products. Codex’s pricing page lists Pro plans at $100, $200 or $500 a month, with Ultrafast mode only on the $500 plan, which is why you will see Codex described as a $100, a $200 and a $500 tool by writers who each saw part of it. OpenAI no longer states a multiple of Plus for each tier, and the page says Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit.

The prices localise. In August, loading the vendor pricing page from this machine rendered the ladder in local currency rather than dollars. I’m reporting that as observed rather than converting anything, because the point isn’t the exchange rate. It’s that the dollar figures every article quotes, this one included, are the US ones, and yours may not match.

How do Codex credits actually work?

Credits are the overflow mechanism, and they only ever engage after your included usage is spent. OpenAI’s help centre is unusually clear about the order: “Your plan’s included usage is used first. After you hit plan limits, usage draws from your credit balance.”

Four properties are worth knowing before you switch anything on.

Credit terms	What it means
Who can buy	Plus and Pro only
Expiry	12 months, no roll-over, non-refundable
Shared with	ChatGPT Work, Excel, Workspace Agents
Auto top-up	Optional, with a settable monthly cap

They are Plus and Pro only. The credits documentation, as worded in August 2026, states they “currently can only be used with Codex (for Plus/Pro users only) and ChatGPT for Excel” — the shared pool below is the rate card’s wider list, so expect this to keep moving. On Free and Go there is nothing to buy, which is why those two tiers cannot overspend.

They expire. Credits are valid for twelve months from purchase, do not roll over past that, and are non-refundable and non-transferable. Buying a large balance to smooth out a busy quarter is a worse idea than it sounds.

The pool is shared. Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT for Excel and Workspace Agents all draw from the same credit balance. A spreadsheet habit and a coding habit compete for the same money.

Auto top-up exists and is a real risk surface. You set a minimum balance and a target, and when you drop below the minimum OpenAI buys enough to get you back up, using the card on file. There is a maximum monthly spend setting. Set it. This is the same lesson I learned the expensive way with Cursor’s spend limit, which sat available on my plan for eleven months while I never opened it.

The Codex rate card, model by model

Here is the part almost nobody reads and everybody should. Credits are consumed per million tokens, and the rate depends entirely on which model is doing the work. These are OpenAI’s Standard-speed rates on 26 October 2026.

Model	Input (credits/1M tok)	Cached (credits/1M tok)	Output (credits/1M tok)
GPT-6 Astra	250	25	1,250
GPT-6.1 Sol	50	2.5	250
GPT-6 Sol	50	5	250
GPT-6 Luna	2.5	0.25	12.5
GPT-5.6 Sol	100	10	500
GPT-5.6 Terra	50	5	300
GPT-5.6 Luna	5	0.5	30
GPT-Rosalind-Research	125	12.5	625

The spread is the story. Output on GPT-6 Astra costs 100 times what the same output costs on GPT-6 Luna. The card also lists two Daybreak cyber models that need Trusted Access for Cyber approval, and the dearer of them, Daybreak Red, bills output at 1,875 credits, 150 times Luna’s rate.

Two things on that card have moved since August. GPT-5.6 Sol is cheaper, at 100, 10 and 500 credits against 125, 12.50 and 750 before, and OpenAI says that promotional pricing runs at least through 21 November 2026. And GPT-5.5 is gone: it retired from Codex for ChatGPT sign-in on 14 October 2026, along with the GPT-5.4 models that left on 31 August.

Three practical consequences follow.

Output is where the money goes. On every model in the table, output costs five or six times what input costs. A verbose agent that narrates its reasoning at length is literally more expensive than a terse one producing the same diff.

Cached input is nearly free, and cache writes are free outright. Cached input runs at a tenth of fresh input on every row above except GPT-6.1 Sol, where it is a twentieth (the two GPT-Image-2 rows, which I’ve left out, charge a quarter). OpenAI says Codex credit billing “has no separate cache-write charge.” Long sessions on one codebase are cheaper per turn than the token counts suggest.

Model choice is a bigger lever than prompt discipline. You can trim your prompts carefully and save a few percent, or switch model and save an order of magnitude. That is the opposite of how Claude Code prices the same work, where the plan rather than the model sets your ceiling.

What does a real Codex task cost?

OpenAI’s current guidance is that “a typical GPT-5.6 Sol task may use 2-15 credits.” That is far below the 5 to 40 credits it quoted in August, partly because Sol’s rates fell.

To see where the credits go, take the token mix from a worked example OpenAI published in its Business rate card in August, 20,000 input tokens, 80,000 cached input tokens and 5,000 output tokens, and price it on today’s GPT-5.6 Sol rates. The arithmetic is mine:

Component	Calculation	Credits
Input	20,000 / 1M × 100	2.00
Cached input	80,000 / 1M × 10	0.80
Output	5,000 / 1M × 500	2.50
Total		5.30

Note what that shows: cached input was four times the volume of fresh input and cost less than half as much, while output was the smallest token count and the largest single charge.

The rate card still never states what any of that costs in money. You can work it out anyway.

What is a Codex credit actually worth?

A Codex credit is worth $0.04, so 25 credits is a dollar. Divide any current model’s published API dollar rate by its Codex credit rate and $0.0400 falls out every time.

OpenAI said the April repricing was to “align with API token usage,” and that turns out to be exact rather than approximate. These are the four models listed on both OpenAI’s API price list and the Codex rate card on 26 October 2026, at Standard speed:

Model	API $/1M output	Credits/1M output	$ per credit
GPT-6 Astra	$50.00	1,250	$0.0400
GPT-6.1 Sol	$10.00	250	$0.0400
GPT-6 Luna	$0.50	12.5	$0.0400
GPT-5.6 Sol	$20.00	500	$0.0400

The input and cached-input columns give the same answer: twelve figures across four models, all four cents. There is an independent check on the Codex page itself. Voice in the desktop app costs “$0.05 per minute”, and on credit-based billing the same page prices it at 1.25 credits a minute. At four cents a credit, 1.25 credits is exactly five cents.

When I first worked this out in August, the figure also appeared in the terms of OpenAI’s Codex student offer, which described a $100 grant as “2,500 credits.” And a thread on r/codex after the April repricing put a 22-credit prompt at roughly $0.88, which is 22 credits at four cents to the penny.

That makes the rate card readable:

What OpenAI says	In dollars
A typical GPT-5.6 Sol task, 2–15 credits	$0.08 – $0.60
The worked example above, 5.30 credits	$0.21
$100–200 per developer per month (August figure)	2,500 – 5,000 credits

The criticism is not that OpenAI hides the number. It is that four cents a credit appears on none of the pages a person budgeting for Codex would actually read. The pricing page lists credit rates per million tokens and voice in dollars, and leaves you to connect the two.

In August the documentation also contradicted itself about who had moved to token pricing: the pricing page said Plus and Pro would stay on message-based pricing until migrated, while the rate card said it applied to them. That has since been tidied up. The current page applies token rates to credit-based plans generally and says only “a small subset of Enterprise customers” stays on the legacy rate card until migrated.

What are the usage limits before credits start?

Limits are expressed as local messages per rolling five-hour window, and they vary by model. These are OpenAI’s estimates for Plus and the Standard Business seat on the Codex pricing page:

Model	Local messages / 5h on Plus
GPT-6 Astra	5–45
GPT-6.1 Sol	15–160
GPT-6 Sol	15–150
GPT-6 Luna	350–3,000

Those ranges are wide because they are averages that depend on task size. OpenAI says they “are not fixed message limits”, that cloud tasks may use more of the allowance than local messages, and that weekly limits may also apply. Pro is different: the page says “Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit.”

Because the estimates are so wide, the number that matters is your own. OpenAI points to a usage dashboard that shows current limits and reset times, and inside a Codex CLI session the /status command shows what you have left. Its advice is to check the dashboard every week or two to understand your pace. I’d do it in the first week especially, before the habit of buying credits forms, so you learn which model and which kind of task actually eats your allowance.

Two other things eat the allowance faster than the table suggests. Image generation uses included limits about three to five times faster on average, and it is not available on Free. Speed modes cost more too: Fast mode uses included usage at 2.5 times the Standard rate, and Ultrafast, on Pro $500 for GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, at eight times.

One thing has improved for Plus since August. Back then the vendor’s table marked cloud tasks and code reviews “Not available” on Plus. The current Plus card lists Codex on the web and “cloud-based integrations like automatic code review and Slack integration”, so pull-request review no longer needs a Pro or Business plan.

What does Codex cost for a team?

Business is $20 per user per month on annual billing, or $25 if you pay monthly, with a two-seat minimum. That buys a shared workspace, admin controls and SAML SSO on top of everything in the individual plans.

The mechanics change in one important way at this level. Where an individual buys credits for themselves, Business, Edu and Enterprise plans on flexible pricing purchase workspace credits — a shared balance for the organisation rather than a personal one. That is better for budgeting and worse for attribution: one team member’s expensive week draws down the same pool everyone else is working from, and nothing in the plan structure stops it.

Enterprise and Edu work differently again, and the vendor’s own note here is easy to skim past. Two things follow from it:

• With flexible pricing, there are no fixed rate limits at all. Usage simply scales with credits, which means the only real ceiling is what your organisation is willing to buy.
• Without flexible pricing, Enterprise and Edu seats “have the same per-seat usage limits as Plus for most features” — the same $20-tier allowance, at an enterprise price.

That second point is worth checking before signing anything. An enterprise contract does not automatically buy more Codex headroom than a $20 Plus seat; the flexible-pricing arrangement is what does.

When does a Codex API key beat a plan?

There is a third way to pay that sits outside the subscription ladder entirely. OpenAI states that “all users may also run extra local tasks using an API key, with usage charged at standard API rates” — no plan required, no credits involved, billed per token like any other API workload.

It is the right answer in three situations, and the wrong one in a fourth.

Your situation	Better instrument	Why
A few tasks a month	API key	No monthly floor to justify
Billing work to clients	API key	Per-project keys, separable reporting
Codex running in CI	API key	No developer for a seat to belong to
Coding with it daily	A plan	Capped; per-token billing has no ceiling

When your usage is genuinely occasional. A subscription is a bet that you will use it. If you reach for a coding agent twice a month, per-token billing on those two occasions will cost less than any monthly plan, including Go.

When you need per-project cost attribution. Credits come out of one pool and tell you nothing about which client or repository consumed them. API keys can be issued per project and reported on separately. For anyone billing work through to a customer, that is not a nice-to-have.

When Codex runs inside a pipeline. A subscription seat is attached to a person. If Codex is running in CI or on a schedule rather than in front of a developer, there is no person for the seat to belong to, and API billing is the shape that fits.

The case against is simply the one OpenAI’s own numbers make. If the company’s estimate of $100 to $200 per developer per month describes you, you are a daily user, and daily users are exactly who the capped plans are priced for. Per-token billing on that volume has no ceiling at all — and unlike the plan tiers, nothing prompts you to stop. Cursor’s metered billing on its old Pro plan had exactly that shape, and it is why I stopped treating “per token” as automatically cheaper.

There is also a useful hybrid the documentation permits: stay on a plan for your normal work, and use an API key for the overflow instead of buying credits. That keeps the predictable part predictable and pushes the spiky part somewhere you can meter and attribute it.

Three realistic Codex pricing scenarios

Using the four-cent figure from earlier, here is what the three common patterns actually look like in money rather than credits.

Profile	What a month looks like	Overflow cost	Where it lands
Evenings and weekends	A handful of tasks a session, well inside Plus’s five-hour estimates	None	Free or Plus
Daily, one project	Regularly meeting the five-hour window, occasional weekly limits	~50 extra Sol tasks ≈ $4–30	Plus plus credits, or Pro $100
Several agents in parallel	Limits hit constantly, many Sol tasks a day at 2–15 credits each	Hundreds of tasks; Pro removes the five-hour limit	Pro $200 or $500

Those middle-row numbers are a range rather than a forecast, because a typical Sol task spans 2 to 15 credits depending on how much context and output it involves, a 7.5-fold spread that no amount of arithmetic will narrow for you in advance.

The middle row is where the money gets decided, and it is the row most people misjudge. Hitting your five-hour window a couple of times a week feels like a minor annoyance rather than a pricing signal, so the natural move is to buy a few credits and carry on. Do that repeatedly and you have built yourself a metered plan without ever choosing one — which is precisely how my Cursor bill reached $159.22 in a single month on a plan I had joined at $20.

The alternative is to treat the second or third limit-hit as a decision point rather than a nuisance: either move up a tier, where the cost is fixed and knowable, or switch to a cheaper model and stay where you are.

Is Codex free?

Yes, and unusually for this category, meaningfully so.

I tested this directly. On 31 July 2026 I ran two full Codex tasks on a free ChatGPT plan, no card involved, and the substantive one renamed 33 of 33 references across seven files and three languages. I verified the result against disk rather than trusting the transcript: the JSON still parsed at 28 nodes, the embedded JavaScript passed node --check, and four Python files passed py_compile.

That matters because a persistent claim in this category is that Codex requires ChatGPT Pro. It does not, and the free tier is not a demo — it completed a real multi-file refactor.

The free tier also has a property the paid tiers have now lost: it cannot bill you. Credits are Plus and Pro only, so when a free plan runs out it stops. If predictability is what you want from a coding agent, the free tier is currently the most predictable thing OpenAI sells.

Codex pricing versus Claude Code and Cursor

I’ve paid real invoices to two of these three, so the comparison below mixes verified billing with documented rates rather than pretending it’s all the same kind of evidence. Cursor’s rows reflect The X Subscription, which replaced the Pro plan I used to pay for when it launched on 12 October 2026.

Cost shape	Codex	Claude Code	Cursor
Free tier	Yes, real	None	Yes, Cursor’s own models
Entry paid	$20, inside ChatGPT Plus	$20, Claude Pro	$8 Plus (own models), $30 Premium
Top tier	$500	$200	$200
Past the allowance	Buy credits (Plus/Pro)	Usage credits	Prepaid credit; Claude and GPT billed per token from the first request
Vendor’s own usage estimate	~$100–200/developer/mo (August)	$150–250/developer/mo	not published

The interesting column is the last one. Both OpenAI and Anthropic publish an expected monthly spend that sits far above their own headline tier, and the two figures nearly overlap. That is a strong hint about what running an agent seriously actually costs, regardless of which one you pick.

Where they genuinely differ is at zero. Codex is free to try properly; Claude Code has no free tier at all. And where they’ve converged is past the allowance: all three can now keep billing you, which was not true of two of them a year ago.

I’d add one caution about my own evidence here. My Cursor numbers come from eleven months of my own invoices on the old Pro plan and my Claude Code numbers from a live subscription, but my Codex figures are documentation plus twenty minutes of free-tier testing. I can tell you precisely what Cursor cost me at volume. I cannot tell you what Codex costs at volume from experience, only what OpenAI says it costs.

What are the best Codex alternatives, and what do they cost?

Codex is the cheapest of these to try if you want an agent working on your own code: its free ChatGPT tier ran two full tasks for me without a card. If it doesn’t fit how you build, these are the tools to look at next, sorted by the job you want done. Entry prices come from the pricing guide linked in each row, where each one carries its own check date.

If you want	Look at	Entry price	Full breakdown
A terminal agent on capped plans	Claude Code	$20/mo with Claude Pro, no free tier	Claude Code pricing
An AI code editor	Cursor	Free; Plus $8 (Cursor’s own models), Premium $30	Cursor pricing
A working app from a prompt	Lovable	Free; Pro $25 for 100 credits	Lovable pricing
The same, billed by token	Bolt	Free 1M tokens a month; Pro from $25	Bolt pricing
Code, hosting and a database in one tab	Replit	Free; Core $20	Replit pricing

The split that matters is who touches the code. Claude Code and Cursor sit beside a developer, the way Codex does. Lovable, Bolt and Replit are for people who want the finished app and would rather not read the code at all. For a ranking of eight tools on one identical build, see the best AI for coding.

How do you keep the Codex bill down?

OpenAI’s pricing page lists its own tips: control prompt size, limit source material, match the output to the need, shrink your AGENTS.md and cut unused MCP servers. It also suggests checking whether “a smaller model or tighter task scope would still produce a useful result.” Below they’re reordered by how much difference each actually makes, with two of my own at the end.

1. Switch models for routine work. On OpenAI’s own Plus estimates, GPT-6 Luna allows 350 to 3,000 local messages per five hours against 15 to 160 for GPT-6.1 Sol, and its credit rate is a twentieth of Sol’s. Nothing else here is close.
2. Shrink your AGENTS.md. Every request carries it. OpenAI suggests nesting smaller files through a large repository rather than maintaining one big one at the root.
3. Disable MCP servers you aren’t using. Each connected server adds context to every message, and the same context discipline is the first thing I set up when using Claude Code too. This is the one people forget, because an MCP server costs nothing while it sits idle in the config and costs on every request once it’s connected.
4. Trim prompts and source material. OpenAI lists these first, and I’d rank them below the rest, not because they don’t work but because the model you pick moves the number by an order of magnitude and careful wording moves it by a few percent. Do it, but don’t mistake it for the lever.
5. Turn fast mode off unless you need it. Fast mode uses included usage at 2.5 times the Standard rate, and Ultrafast at eight times. Paying a premium for speed on a task you’re going to walk away from is pure waste.
6. Watch the shared pool. Mine. Because Codex, ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT for Excel draw on the same allowance and credit balance, a heavy spreadsheet week reduces your coding headroom without anything in Codex changing.

Which Codex plan should you buy?

You are	Buy	Because
Evaluating it	Free	It completes real multi-file work and cannot bill you
Coding a few evenings a week	Plus, $20	The realistic entry point; add credits only if you hit walls
Working with it daily	Pro $100	The step where limits stop shaping your day
Running several agents at once	Pro $200 or $500	No five-hour limit on any Pro plan
Needing PR review in GitHub	Plus or above	Automatic code review now comes with Plus
A team	Business, $20/user	Annual billing; $25 if you go monthly

The upgrade path I’d actually recommend is to start on Free rather than Plus. Not to save $20, but because the free tier is the only one that tells you the truth about your usage: it stops, visibly, at a limit, instead of quietly converting your habits into a credit purchase. Find out how fast you hit that wall, then buy the tier that matches. That is the same test I applied to whether Claude Code is worth it, and it gave a different answer than the pricing page did.

The final word

Codex pricing is $0 to $500 a month, and that range is close to meaningless without the second half of the sentence.

The whole thing	In five rows
Cheapest real option	Free tier, and it genuinely works
Realistic entry	Plus, $20/mo
What a credit is worth	$0.04 of API value — 25 to the dollar
A typical GPT-5.6 Sol task	2–15 credits, so $0.08–$0.60
What OpenAI said you’d spend (August)	$100–200 per developer per month

The plan price buys an allowance. Since 30 October 2025 the allowance is no longer the end of the story on Plus and Pro, because credits let the meter keep running — with auto top-up available to make that happen without a decision. The estimate OpenAI published in August of what developers spend, $100 to $200 a month, is five to ten times its own entry paid tier. Both numbers come from the same company.

Four things I’d take away. A credit is four cents of API value, so 25 credits is a dollar and a typical GPT-5.6 Sol task runs $0.08 to $0.60; you can do this arithmetic yourself now. The free tier is genuinely worth using, and it is the only tier left that cannot surprise you. Model choice moves the bill far more than prompt discipline, by 100 times between GPT-6 Luna’s and GPT-6 Astra’s output rates. And set a maximum monthly spend before enabling auto top-up, because unbounded and expensive feel identical right up until the month they aren’t.

One caveat on all of the above, and I’d rather state it than let it age quietly: this describes what OpenAI published on 26 October 2026. Since I first wrote it in August, a new model generation has arrived, GPT-5.5 and the GPT-5.4 models have retired, Sol’s rates have been cut on a promotion that runs at least through 21 November, and Pro has gained a $500 tier. Check the date on anything you read about Codex pricing, including this. The rest of my coding-agent teardowns are here.

For what that budget buys against the alternatives, we ranked eight tools on one identical build.