OpenAI Codex Pricing: What Every Plan Costs and Holds

Codex arrives inside a ChatGPT plan rather than being sold on its own, so the price you pay is a ChatGPT price, and what decides your month is how much work the plan’s allowance holds before it stops.

Codex comes with a ChatGPT plan rather than its own subscription, and OpenAI’s pricing documentation put the free tier at $0 a month on 31 August 2026. What separates the plans is the allowance: a number of messages per five-hour window that changes with the model you pick, and that number decides how much work a month buys.

Every price, allowance and credit figure below was read on 31 August 2026 from OpenAI’s own Codex pricing documentation and its speed page, not from a screenshot, a round-up or an older copy of those pages, and where OpenAI’s consumer pricing pages refused an automated read that day this page says so rather than guessing.

Here is the first instance of that. As of 31 August 2026, OpenAI’s consumer Codex pricing page at chatgpt.com/codex/pricing does not render a figure to an automated read. Both its general pricing page at chatgpt.com/pricing and its business pricing page at openai.com/business/pricing refused the same read that day. All three are named unlinked because nothing here is drawn from them. The documentation pages do render, and they carry the same ladder plus two tables the consumer pages never had.

Those two tables are why this page exists, because the plan price is the least interesting number OpenAI publishes. The documentation prints local messages per five-hour window by model and by tier, where the spread inside one plan is wider than the spread between plans, and it prints the cost of a message in credits once that window is empty. Round-ups reproduce the ladder and skip both.

One person built the customer system their one-person service business runs on with an OpenAI coding agent. If that is the month you are budgeting for, the plan name tells you almost nothing.

How much does OpenAI Codex cost?

Codex costs whatever your ChatGPT plan costs, because it is bundled into that plan rather than billed beside it. The unpaid tier includes it at $0 a month, read 31 August 2026. Above that, each step up buys a bigger allowance of the same agent, and one route skips the plan entirely.

Prices and billing bases read 31 August 2026 on OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation.

Two rows are the ones round-ups get wrong.

The Pro row is a from-price. OpenAI’s documentation names a $100 a month tier and a $200 a month tier, read 31 August 2026, and they are not two ways of paying for the same thing. The page labels them by what they multiply, so the higher one is bought for allowance rather than for features. Pages that print Pro as a single hundred-dollar figure are quoting the entry point of a two-step tier and calling it the tier.

The Business row is a per-seat price with two bases and a floor. OpenAI’s page states $20 per user per month billed annually and $25 per user per month billed monthly, with a minimum of two users, read 31 August 2026. Two of the four Codex pricing round-ups fetched for this page on that date describe Business as pay as you go, which would mean no seat commitment and no annual discount. Both bases are on the page. For a two-person team the annual basis is a fifth off the monthly one.

The last row is not a plan at all. Running Codex on an API key removes the subscription fee and moves the whole bill onto token use, which has its own section further down.

Is Codex free, and what does the unpaid plan cover?

Codex is genuinely free on the ChatGPT free plan at $0 a month, read 31 August 2026, and that is a permanently included tier rather than a trial with a clock on it. What the unpaid plan does not get is a published per-model allowance table, which is the thing every paid tier is really buying.

The distinction matters because “free” carries two meanings on pricing pages in this category. A free trial gives you the paid product for a fixed number of days and then stops. A free tier gives you a smaller version with no end date, and Codex is the second kind: the agent is on the account from the start, and the paid plans widen the pipe rather than unlock the door.

That changes what an upgrade is for. You are already using the agent before you pay anything, so the first paid step gets bought after you have hit a wall and know which wall it was, which is a better position to buy from than one where the first payment is a bet on whether the tool suits you at all.

The practical limit on the unpaid tier is that OpenAI’s allowance table starts at Plus. The free plan’s ceiling is not published as a number of messages per window on that page as of 31 August 2026, so the honest advice is to use it until it stops and note how long that took.

What do the Codex usage limits on Plus and Pro actually buy?

A ChatGPT plan buys a number of local messages inside a rolling five-hour window, and that number changes by model as well as by tier. The published spread inside one plan runs from ten messages to two thousand, so the model you point at a problem moves your ceiling further than the plan you bought does.

Local messages per five-hour window, read 31 August 2026 on OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation. The Business column on that table carries the same numbers as the Plus column. The API key column is stated as usage-based rather than as a message count, because on that route nothing is included in the first place.

The same subscription buys ten messages or two thousand messages in the same five hours, and the only thing that moved is which model you pointed at the problem.

Read the Plus column top to bottom and the point lands. Ten to a hundred messages on GPT-5.6 Sol, or 250 to 2,000 on GPT-5.6 Luna, in the same window on the same subscription. A founder debugging one payment flow all afternoon on the first model and a founder doing routine edits on the second are on the same plan and in different situations entirely.

The ranges are ranges for a reason. OpenAI publishes each cell as a span rather than a fixed number, so the allowance is consumed by the size of the work rather than counted by the message. A message that sends a large file and gets a long answer eats more of the window than a one-line correction, so two people on Plus can spend the same afternoon and hit the wall at very different counts.

Two things drain the allowance faster than a plain message, and both are published. Image generation is one: OpenAI’s documentation states that “Image generations use included limits 3-5x faster on average than similar turns without image generation, depending on image quality and size”. The faster setting is the other, priced in credits rather than in messages, which the credits section takes apart.

One gap in this table is worth saying out loud, because it is what people plan around. As of 31 August 2026, OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation does not document any carry-over of unused allowance from one five-hour window into the next. That is what the page shows on that date rather than a stated policy either way, so treat the window as use it or lose it until OpenAI says otherwise.

The demand for this is not subtle. One thread title in r/OpenaiCodex reads: We need to keep posting about Codex usage limits and warn people before they waste…. The confusion is about the ceiling rather than the price, and the ceiling is what the price is really buying.

Voice use sits on the same meter and is published separately: roughly 15 to 30 minutes on Plus, roughly one to two and a half hours on Pro 5x, unlimited access on Pro 20x, and roughly 45 minutes on Business, all inside the same rolling window, read 31 August 2026. If you dictate rather than type, that is a real constraint on the entry tier.

One more piece of the shape explains why the window empties faster than people expect: the chat product and the agent draw on the same window on ChatGPT plans. A read of that sentence dated 25 August 2026 scoped it more narrowly than the read dated 31 August 2026, which now applies it across ChatGPT plans generally. The wording moved between two reads six days apart, which is the best evidence available that everything here is worth re-checking on the day you buy.

What happens when you run out?

Work already in progress keeps going to the end of that turn. After that you wait for the window to refresh, buy credits if your plan allows it, or move to a model with a bigger allowance. Only the third of those costs nothing, and it is the one nobody markets.

OpenAI’s documentation states that “If you reach your usage limits during an active turn, the agent will be able to continue working on that turn, subject to fair use limits”. A long job started at the edge of the window is not killed mid-thought, which matters when the agent is forty minutes into a database migration.

Buying more without changing plans is documented for individual paid subscribers, and it is what makes the entry tier survivable in a bad week. On a workspace agreement the equivalent takes a different shape: OpenAI’s page states that “Business, Edu, and Enterprise plans with flexible pricing can purchase additional workspace credits to continue working”. The same documentation names a third route open to everyone: “All users may also run extra local chats using an API key, with usage charged at standard API rates”.

Workspace accounts run off a shared balance rather than a personal one. OpenAI’s workspace usage and cost guidance describes eligible activity drawing down an allocated credit balance without creating a new charge by itself, and says continuing past that balance depends on how the account is configured. On a team plan, what happens at the end of the balance is an administrative setting rather than a product rule.

Switching models is the free version of the same fix, in the sense that a cheaper model stretches whatever allowance is left; the published table does not say whether cheaper models stay available once the limit is reached, so read it as prevention rather than recovery. On the published table, GPT-5.6 Luna’s Plus allowance is between twenty and twenty-five times GPT-5.6 Sol’s, depending on which end of each range you land at. Most of what an agent does on an ordinary afternoon does not need the costliest model, and someone who never learns which tasks do is buying a bigger allowance to solve a problem a model switch would have solved.

Then there is what happens to whatever you did not spend:

Where does my unspent Codex quota go every time OpenAI “gifts” me a forced reset?

That thread title, from r/codex, is asking about carry-over, and the honest answer today is the documented absence above rather than a number. Nothing on OpenAI’s pricing documentation as of 31 August 2026 says the unused part of a window survives the rolling reset.

How much does a Codex credit cost?

OpenAI publishes what a message costs in credits and does not publish what a credit costs in money on that page. As of 31 August 2026, its Codex pricing documentation states that Plus and Pro users can buy additional credits when they hit their limit, and prints no dollar price for a credit anywhere on the page.

That is the answer to the most-searched version of this question. The two help-centre articles the documentation links for credit details both refused an automated read on the same date, so this page does not claim to know what they say; help.openai.com is named unlinked for that reason. What OpenAI does publish, in detail, is the credit cost of the tokens themselves.

Credit cost per million tokens, read 31 August 2026 on OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation. The same published table carries further rows for an image model and for two models that require separate approval, which sit outside what a founder budgeting a coding subscription needs.

Three things fall out of that table. Output costs five to six times input on every row, so an agent that writes long explanations costs more than a terse one doing the same work. Cached input costs exactly a tenth of fresh input on every row, which rewards keeping a stable set of project instructions instead of re-explaining the project every session. And GPT-5.6 Luna costs a twentieth of GPT-5.6 Sol on input and roughly a seventeenth on output, the same lever the allowance table was pulling.

For a rough sense of scale, OpenAI states that “GPT-5.6 usage averages 5-30 credits per message”. A heavy afternoon is therefore hundreds of credits rather than tens, and that range is six times wide because the size of the turn is doing the work.

The faster setting has its own multiplier, published on a separate page. OpenAI’s Codex speed documentation says “Fast mode increases supported model speed by 1.5x and consumes credits at a higher rate than Standard mode”, and gives the multipliers: GPT-5.6 and GPT-5.5 consume credits at 2.5 times the standard rate, and GPT-5.4 at 2 times. Buying 1.5 times the speed for 2.5 times the credits is a trade worth making on a bug that is blocking everything else and a bad habit on routine work. That page also notes that on an API key the ChatGPT credit multipliers do not apply and API token pricing takes over, with priority processing on the current top model costing twice the standard API token rate.

One dated caveat on the top model. OpenAI’s documentation says its promotional pricing runs at least through 21 November 2026, so the first row of that table sits at a promotional level with a floor date attached. If you are planning past November, plan on it moving.

None of this converts into dollars on OpenAI’s page, and this page does not convert it either. Multiplying a credit count by a rate found somewhere else would produce a number that looks authoritative and is not sourced.

Codex CLI cost and the API key route

The Codex CLI has no price of its own. It runs on the ChatGPT plan you already have, or on an API key with no plan fee and no subscription allowance behind it. The feature grid on OpenAI’s pricing documentation lists the CLI and the IDE extension as available on every tier including the API key route, read 31 August 2026.

That is worth knowing before you look for a developer tier, because there is no separate terminal product to buy. The same subscription that covers the chat product covers the command line, and the allowance is shared rather than duplicated.

The API key route changes the shape of the bill rather than its size. On a subscription you pay a fixed amount and get a variable allowance. On a key you get a variable bill, charged on tokens at API rates, subject to how the API account is set up: prepaid balance, monthly budget and rate limits are account settings on the platform side. The subscription caps your spending and rations your work; the key rations nothing by default and caps only what you configure.

Which suits you turns on whether your usage is steady or spiky. A steady week fits a subscription, because you use most of what you bought. A month with one enormous push and three quiet weeks fits a key. The expensive middle is a spiky month on a subscription you keep topping up.

What the tokens behind an API key add up to per customer, once real people are using your app, is worked out on the page that follows that arithmetic; this page stops at OpenAI’s own meter. The two are different questions. This one is what the tool costs you to build with. That one is what your own product costs to serve once other people are using it, and founders who fold them together tend to discover the difference on a bill.

A tool subscription is one line on a monthly bill that also carries hosting, a database and whatever meters your users trip, and that whole total is added up elsewhere. What a coding platform charges once an agent is also building and hosting the same app has a separate count of its own. The workload meter behind a no-code subscription counts something else entirely, and it is followed where those tiers are tracked.

Codex vs Claude Code pricing: what actually differs

The two products meter the same way and start from different places. Codex is included in a ChatGPT plan that has a free tier, so the first payment buys more room on an agent the account already had. On the Anthropic side the first paid step buys access to the agent itself. Both then ration work through a rolling window shared with the vendor’s chat product.

That sounds like a small difference and it changes how you should shop. When the agent is already on your account, the sensible move is to use it until you hit the ceiling and then buy the tier that clears the ceiling you actually hit. When the agent sits behind the first payment, you are buying on a guess and your own money is the trial.

The metering shape matches in one respect: neither vendor sells a number of tasks. Both sell an allowance measured by how much work the agent did, refreshed on a window, drained faster by costlier models. Anyone who tells you one is cheaper without saying which model at which intensity is comparing plan prices and calling it a cost comparison.

Anthropic’s own ladder for Claude Code, with its own read dates and its own token rates, lives on the page that tracks it, and none of those figures are repeated here. Keeping each vendor’s numbers on the page that re-checks them is the only way either set stays true, because both move.

Price is also the least interesting axis on which these tools differ. How the coding agents differ on rules files, permissions and review decides more of your year than the price gap between two subscriptions, because a control you cannot configure costs you every week. Which of the two agents does better work is a different question from what each one charges, and it is answered where the two are put side by side. How two entry subscriptions compare when the free plans underneath them are not the same is argued where those two products are set against each other.

The pattern is not unique to these two. What Google charges for its own coding agent is tracked on its own page, and there too the agent rides a general subscription while the allowance does the real pricing.

What no Codex plan buys you

Some limits are published as tier restrictions and some are the shape of the product. The published ones are worth knowing before you upgrade for a feature. The unpublished one is that no plan here watches a live application or answers for it when it breaks.

Four rows on OpenAI’s feature availability grid read the same way on two separate automated passes on 31 August 2026, so this page states those four and no others. The Codex CLI and the IDE extension are available on every tier including the API key route. The research-preview model is Pro only. Role-based access control, SCIM provisioning and audit logs are Enterprise and Education only.

Several other rows in that grid did not resolve to the same reading twice, and this page does not state them. That is a limit on reading a dense table from the outside, and a guessed tier restriction is worse than a missing one. Check the grid yourself for any feature you are upgrading specifically to get.

The bigger boundary is not on the grid at all. A subscription buys agent time. It does not buy an application that stays up, a check that tells you the signup form stopped working, error tracking, a database backup you have restored once to prove it works, or anyone answering at two in the morning. Every plan here is priced per unit of the agent’s work, and none is priced against your app still functioning next Tuesday.

That gap is where a monthly total quietly outruns its value. One person publishing their monthly tool bill listed several separate subscriptions and metered services against revenue that did not cover them. Each line item looked reasonable on its own; the sum did not, and no single vendor’s pricing page was ever going to show them that.

At some point the useful comparison stops being one plan against another and becomes another month of agent spend against paying a person once to fix the specific thing that keeps breaking. A single named fault in an otherwise working app is a finishable piece of work; a list of faults is a different purchase. Whether another month of agent spend beats paying a person once for the same result is worked through where that comparison is made.

What a person costs, and how that changes with the route you hire through, is collected where those bands are kept. This page has no view on which side of that line you fall, only that a bigger subscription does not solve a bug the agent has already failed to fix.

Which ChatGPT plan is the right one for Codex?

Pick the plan by the allowance you need, not the price you want. Start on the free tier, because Codex is already there. Move to Plus when the window stops you mid-task weekly, and to Pro when it stops you daily on the costliest model. Buy the higher Pro tier only after the lower one runs out.

The free tier is the right starting point for anyone who has not yet found their ceiling, which is most people reading a pricing page. You cannot pick the right tier before you know which model you work in and how heavy your turns are, and both come out of a fortnight of use.

Plus, at $20 a month read 31 August 2026, is the right tier when the interruption pattern is the problem rather than the volume. If you are stopped once or twice a week mid-task and can wait out the window without losing the thread, the entry tier plus an occasional credit top-up may beat a permanent upgrade, provided the top-ups over a month cost less than the difference between the tiers, which you can only check against the credit price shown at purchase time, since OpenAI’s documentation prints none.

The lower Pro tier is bought for sustained daily work on the costliest model, which is a narrower case than it sounds. Before paying for it, spend a week deliberately using a cheaper model for routine edits. On the published table, the gap between the cheapest and costliest model on one plan is larger than the gap between Plus and the lower Pro tier on one model, so the free fix is usually available before the paid one.

Business is a seat decision rather than a capacity decision. It gives seats the same published limits as Plus, and what it adds is workspace administration for more than one person under one account. Buying it for extra capacity per person would be a mistake, because on the published table there is none.

The API key route belongs to people with spiky usage or a real need to run Codex inside something automated. It is also the only route with no allowance at all, which is a freedom and a risk at once.

Common questions about OpenAI Codex pricing

How much does Codex cost per month?

Codex costs whatever your ChatGPT plan costs, because it is included rather than sold separately, and the unpaid plan carries it at $0 a month, read 31 August 2026. Paid individual tiers on OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation reach $200 a month at the top, and Business is priced per user. What changes between them is the allowance of messages per five-hour window.

Is Codex free with a ChatGPT account?

Yes. OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation lists the free ChatGPT plan at $0 a month with Codex included, read 31 August 2026, and that is a permanent tier rather than a trial. What it does not get is a published per-model allowance: OpenAI’s table of local messages per five-hour window starts at Plus.

How much does Codex Pro cost?

Pro is a from-price. OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation names a $100 a month tier and a $200 a month tier, read 31 August 2026, and the difference between them is allowance size rather than feature access. The higher tier’s published message allowance is four times the lower one’s on the same model, which is the whole reason to buy it.

How much do Codex credits cost?

OpenAI does not publish a dollar price for a credit on its Codex pricing documentation as of 31 August 2026. That page states that Plus and Pro subscribers can buy additional credits when they hit their limit, and prints the credit cost of tokens per model, but no money-per-credit figure appears on it. The two help-centre articles it links for credit details refused an automated read the same day.

What are the Codex usage limits on Plus?

On Plus, OpenAI publishes local messages per five-hour window running from 10 to 100 on GPT-5.6 Sol up to 250 to 2,000 on GPT-5.6 Luna, read 31 August 2026. Each cell is a range because consumption tracks how much work the turn involved rather than counting messages. Business seats carry the same published numbers as Plus.

When do Codex usage limits reset?

The allowance runs on a rolling five-hour window, so it refreshes continuously rather than at a fixed hour of the day. As of 31 August 2026, OpenAI’s Codex pricing documentation does not document any carry-over of unused allowance from one window to the next, so a quiet morning should not be counted on to fund a heavy afternoon.

Is the Codex CLI free?

The CLI has no separate price. OpenAI’s feature availability grid lists the Codex CLI on every tier including the API key route, read 31 August 2026, so it runs on whatever plan you have. On an API key there is no plan fee, and usage is charged on tokens at API rates instead.

Do I need a separate subscription for Codex?

No. Codex is bundled into ChatGPT plans rather than sold as its own product, so there is nothing extra to buy on top of the plan, read 31 August 2026. The only other billing route OpenAI documents is an API key, which replaces the subscription rather than adding to it.

Is Codex cheaper than Claude Code?

The two cannot be ranked on plan price alone, because the free tiers underneath them differ: a free ChatGPT plan includes Codex, while on the Anthropic side the first paid step is what turns Claude Code on. Both then ration work through a rolling window shared with the vendor’s chat product, so the real comparison is allowance at your model and intensity. Anthropic’s figures are kept on the page that tracks them.