OpenAI Keeps Codex's Weekly Caps Vague: What Each ChatGPT Plan Actually Gets

If you use Codex through a ChatGPT plan, the number you most want is the one OpenAI doesn't publish. Every plan from Free to Enterprise includes Codex, yet OpenAI gives no weekly allowance for any of them. The closest thing to a hard figure is a set of estimates for how many local messages Plus and Business Standard users can send in a five-hour window, and even those span a tenfold range. What OpenAI does spell out is how quickly your choices eat the allowance. Fast mode counts at 2.5 times the normal rate, Ultrafast at eight times, and the gap between GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6 Astra is enormous. Once you know that, you can make a plan last much longer, or work out when credits or an API key are the better deal.

Everything here comes from OpenAI's Codex pricing and speed pages, its help center and posts by OpenAI staff, checked on October 9, 2026, Beijing time. These rules change often, so read the figures as a snapshot of this week.

Two windows and one shared pool

According to OpenAI, Codex limits can apply over a five-hour window and a weekly window, depending on your plan. Where both apply, you need room in both to keep going. The five-hour clock isn't fixed to the time of day: a new window starts with your first Work or Codex message after the previous one ends. That is also why you can run out inside five hours while most of your weekly allowance is untouched, which OpenAI describes as expected behavior.

The pool is wider than Codex itself. OpenAI says ChatGPT Work and Codex share the same pricing, credits and usage limits, and that local messages and cloud chats draw from the same allowance. The Codex pricing page adds that on Plus and Pro the limits are also shared with other agentic features once their pricing takes effect, which currently means ChatGPT for Excel. OpenAI's credits article for personal plans goes a step further and says Codex, ChatGPT Work, Excel and PowerPoint can share one agentic allowance on Plus and Pro, with Word drawing on it too. A long spreadsheet session, in other words, can cost you coding time. ChatGPT's own caps on image generation, file uploads and voice are a separate matter, and OpenAI says those banners don't apply to Codex.

OpenAI is blunt that the allowance isn't a message count. Model choice, context size, reasoning, tool use, retrieval and caching all change what a task costs, so two requests that look alike can land very differently. The only gauge you can trust is your own: Settings and then Usage in ChatGPT or the Codex app, or the /status command inside a Codex CLI session.

What each plan gets

This is how OpenAI describes each plan's Codex allowance today. Where no number appears, OpenAI hasn't published one.

• Free ($0) and Go ($8/month): GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout. Codex Cloud isn't included. No five-hour or weekly figures.
• Plus ($20/month): GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, plus limited GPT-6 Astra, under a five-hour window, and OpenAI says weekly limits may also apply. It's the only personal plan with published five-hour estimates.
• Pro ($100, $200 or $500/month): no five-hour limit for now, though each tier still has an included allowance. OpenAI says Pro $200 includes more than Pro $100 and Pro $500 the most, without giving amounts. Pro $100 and Pro $200 can spend their full allowance on Astra. Only Pro $500 gets Ultrafast.
• Business ($20 per user per month billed annually, $25 monthly): Standard seats get the same five-hour estimates as Plus and limited Astra. Premium seats, at $100 a month billed annually or $125 monthly, get five times Standard's included usage and no five-hour limit, according to OpenAI.
• Enterprise and Edu: workspaces on credit-based flexible pricing have no fixed rate limits; usage scales with the workspace's credit pool. Without flexible pricing, OpenAI says the per-seat limits match Plus for most features.

For Plus and Business Standard, OpenAI estimates these local-message ranges per five-hour window:

• GPT-6 Astra: 5 to 45
• GPT-6.1 Sol: 15 to 160
• GPT-6 Sol: 15 to 150
• GPT-6 Luna: 350 to 3,000

OpenAI calls these estimates rather than guarantees, and says cloud tasks can use more than local messages. The ranges are wide enough that the comparison between rows matters more than any single figure: at the bottom of each range, Luna gives you 350 messages where Sol gives you 15 and Astra gives you five. One inconsistency is worth knowing about. OpenAI's Business help article groups GPT-6.1 Sol with GPT-6 Sol at 15 to 150, while the Codex pricing page and OpenAI's Astra usage guide put GPT-6.1 Sol at 15 to 160. We've gone with the pricing page.

There's a second inconsistency at the free end. One older help center article still lists GPT-5.6 Terra as the Codex model for Free and Go, while the Codex pricing page and the September changelog say Free and Go get GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app. We've followed the Codex docs.

If you pay for Pro $200, one date is worth circling. OpenAI says new Pro $200 subscriptions come with a lower allowance than before, "to reflect our increasingly efficient models." Anyone with an active Pro $200 subscription at any point from September 22 through 10 a.m. Pacific on September 29 keeps the previous allowance through October 29, then moves to the lower one at the same $200 price. OpenAI hasn't said how much lower it is.

Why Astra and Fast mode drain you

The credit rate card shows the cost gap between models most clearly. At Standard speed, per million tokens, OpenAI charges:

• GPT-6 Astra: 250 credits input, 25 cached input, 1,250 output
• GPT-6.1 Sol: 50 credits input, 2.5 cached input, 250 output
• GPT-6 Sol: 50 credits input, 5 cached input, 250 output
• GPT-6 Luna: 2.5 credits input, 0.25 cached input, 12.5 output

So token for token, Astra costs five times as much as Sol, and Sol costs 20 times as much as Luna. OpenAI warns that credit prices alone don't determine your included usage, but the message estimates above point the same way.

Speed multiplies all of this. OpenAI's Speed page says Fast mode works on GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna where available, and uses included subscription limits at 2.5 times the Standard rate, while purchased credits and Enterprise pay-as-you-go usage are billed at twice the Standard rate. Ultrafast supports only GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol. It uses included limits at eight times the Standard rate and bills credits at six times. OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast generates tokens up to 8x faster than Astra in Standard mode in Codex. Ultrafast is limited to Pro $500 and eligible Enterprise and Edu plans, and OpenAI says buying credits on any other self-serve plan doesn't unlock it. On Pro $500, it spends your included usage first and then your credits. Our news story "OpenAI adds Ultrafast mode to GPT-6.1 Sol: up to 8x faster, at six times the price" covers the API side.

Notice that both speed modes hit your plan harder than your credit balance. Fast costs 2.5x against included usage but 2x in credits; Ultrafast costs 8x against one and 6x against the other. Put Fast mode on Astra and you are combining the most expensive model with a 2.5x multiplier, which on Plus is the quickest route to an early end to your five-hour window.

A few other things move the needle. OpenAI says image generation uses included limits three to five times faster on average than similar turns without images, and higher reasoning effort uses more allowance and "does not always produce a better result." OpenAI also says Astra at Low effort can outperform Sol at High, so stepping down effort on a stronger model is worth trying before stepping up on a weaker one. Every MCP server you leave enabled and every extra line in a large AGENTS.md adds context to each message, and OpenAI's own advice is to trim both. One recent change works in your favor: auto-review safety checks are free when you're signed in with ChatGPT and don't count toward plan limits. Tibo (@thsottiaux) wrote on October 7, Beijing time, that auto-review can account for 2 to 10 percent of a plan when used.

When you hit the wall

If you reach a limit in the middle of a turn, OpenAI says Codex can finish that turn, subject to fair-use limits. What happens next depends on your plan.

On Plus and Pro, you can buy credits and keep going without upgrading. Your included usage is always spent first, and only then does Codex draw on credits. You can buy them, or turn on automatic reload, from Settings and then Usage in ChatGPT, or Usage & Billing in the Codex app. The same balance works across Codex, ChatGPT Work, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Credits are valid for 12 months and are non-refundable except where law, contract or an approved exception says otherwise, and they aren't API credits. A task that started with a positive balance can push it negative if other usage runs at the same time. What a credit costs in dollars isn't on the pages we checked; OpenAI says purchase prices and discounts depend on your plan or agreement. Free and Go are mostly shut out for now: OpenAI says only a limited group of those users can buy credits, and doing so doesn't raise the plan's included limit.

Plus and Pro accounts may also see an option to buy an instant reset, depending on account and billing country. It restores both the five-hour and weekly allowance the moment checkout succeeds, even if you had usage left, and it can't be saved for later. OpenAI is clear that it pulls your normal weekly allowance forward instead of adding extra usage: your next automatic weekly reset moves to seven days after your first Work or Codex request following the purchase. OpenAI doesn't list the price outside checkout and says it generally doesn't refund these purchases. If you still have allowance left and your regular reset is close, waiting is often the cheaper move.

Then there are banked resets, the free ones OpenAI hands out as promotions or referral rewards. A full banked reset refreshes both windows and also moves your weekly reset date, and it's only used up if it actually refreshes something. They arrive often enough lately that it pays to check Settings and Usage before buying anything. At 03:19 on October 8, Beijing time, Tibo posted: "Loading a banked reset in everyone's paid accounts." OpenAI says future resets aren't guaranteed and that Support won't reset limits for you.

Business works differently. Members use their included seat limits first, then draw on the workspace's shared credit pool if an owner has bought credits. With no credits in the pool, the feature is blocked until an owner adds more. Usage-based Codex-only seats need workspace credits from the first message. Enterprise and Edu workspaces on flexible pricing share a contract-level pool, and once it's gone, advanced features pause unless owners allow overages or buy more.

The API key route

There's one exit from plan limits altogether. You can sign in to the ChatGPT desktop app, the Codex CLI or the IDE extension with an OpenAI API key, and OpenAI then bills you through your Platform account at standard API rates. Plan windows and ChatGPT credit multipliers no longer apply. The trade-offs are real, though. You lose cloud features such as Codex Cloud, GitHub code review and the Slack integration, and the models you can use are whatever your API key has access to. OpenAI says any user can run extra local chats this way and recommends API keys for automation such as CI jobs.

At short context, the API list prices per million tokens are $2 input, $0.10 cached input and $10 output for gpt-6.1-sol; $0.10, $0.01 and $0.50 for gpt-6-luna; and $10, $1 and $50 for gpt-6-astra. On OpenAI's API pricing page, Fast is exactly twice Standard, and GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast is $12 input and $60 output. OpenAI also cautions against using API token prices to estimate how many tasks your subscription includes, since the two are metered separately.

Which limit you keep hitting decides the plan

Watch which meter runs out first. If it's the five-hour window, that is the one thing Pro and Business Premium seats remove, though both still carry an included allowance. If it's the weekly limit, start with model choice: moving routine work to GPT-6 Luna and saving Astra for the problems that need it does more than any setting, and turning off Fast mode on long jobs is the next easiest win. If what's eating your allowance is a scheduled script or CI job, an API key takes it out of the shared pool. Plus users who only go over occasionally have credits and instant resets to bridge the gap. The jump from Plus at $20 to Pro at $100 makes the most sense if you hit the wall every week, with the caveat that OpenAI hasn't said how big Pro's allowance is, beyond the fact that each higher tier gets more.