Codex pricing is not one number: Codex is bundled into ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise, each with its own usage allowance, and then extended with token-based credits or an API key. I went through the Codex pricing page, the developer docs and the usage-limit tables to lay out what each tier actually buys, how the per-model limits work, and where the money goes once you hit them.
Ask “how much does Codex cost” and the honest answer is “it depends which ChatGPT plan you are on and which model you point it at” — which is why Codex pricing is one of the most-searched questions about the product. OpenAI’s own pricing page opens with “Codex is included in your ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise plan”, and everything after that is a matrix of usage estimates, model multipliers and credits. I spent a week with the Codex pricing page, the developer-docs pricing reference and the credit rate card to turn that matrix into something you can budget against.
Because Codex pricing rewards people who spend their allowance on the hard problems and not on scaffolding, I also kept a product builder that produces a deployed, working app from a sentence, Begin, open in the next tab — I explain why at the end.
Codex pricing starts at $0 and climbs to “from $100” for Pro; the interesting numbers are in the usage table underneath.
Codex pricing: the plans
The individual tiers on the Codex pricing page in 2026:
- Free — $0/month. “Limited trial access to Codex”: limited messages and uploads, limited access to GPT-5.6, no image generation. Enough to test Codex on quick tasks.
- Go — $8/month. Still described as trial access, with more messages, more uploads and access to the latest models. Codex for lightweight coding.
- Plus — $20/month. “Power a few focused coding sessions each week.” Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension and on iOS; the macOS and Windows Codex app; cloud integrations such as automatic code review and Slack; the full GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna); plugins for GitHub, Figma and more; and the ability to extend usage with ChatGPT credits.
- Pro — from $100/month. Everything in Plus with 5x the Codex usage, or a higher 20x tier. “Designed for longer, higher-intensity sessions each day.” Unlimited GPT-5.6 subject to abuse guardrails.
Business is $20 per user per month (2+ users, billed annually; $25 monthly) with a dedicated workspace, SAML SSO, larger cloud VMs and no training on your data. Enterprise and Edu are custom, adding SCIM, EKM, audit logs, data residency and priority processing. And separate from all of these, an API key runs Codex in the CLI, SDK or IDE extension at ordinary API rates, with no cloud features.
Codex usage limits by model
This is the part of Codex pricing that matters day to day. Limits are quoted as estimated local messages per five-hour window, and they vary enormously by model:
- GPT-6 Astra — Plus 5–45 · Pro 5x 25–225 · Pro 20x 100–900
- GPT-5.6 Sol — Plus 10–100 · Pro 5x 50–500 · Pro 20x 200–2,000
- GPT-5.6 Terra — Plus 25–200 · Pro 5x 125–1,000 · Pro 20x 500–4,000
- GPT-5.6 Luna — Plus 250–2,000 · Pro 5x 1,250–10,000 · Pro 20x 5,000–40,000
- GPT-5.5 — Plus 15–80 · Pro 5x 75–400 · Pro 20x 300–1,600
Standard Business seats match Plus; Business at $100 uses the Pro 5x numbers. The ranges are wide on purpose: a small script consumes a fraction of a “message”, a long agentic session holding a big repo in context consumes many. Local messages and cloud chats share the same allowance, cloud chats default to Sol and cost more, weekly limits can apply on top, and Fast mode and image generation both burn the allowance faster (images 3–5x).
OpenAI’s guidance on model choice maps directly to cost: Sol for the hardest reasoning and advanced coding, Terra as the everyday workhorse, Luna for fast, high-volume, focused tasks. On Plus, moving a routine task from Sol to Luna is the difference between 10 messages and 250 in the same five hours.
The docs version of Codex pricing adds the detail the marketing page leaves out — shared allowances, weekly caps and what each model is for.
Codex credits: what happens when you run out
Since the move to token-based pricing in April 2026, Codex pricing above the included allowance runs on credits. Plus and Pro users can buy extra credits instead of upgrading; Business, Edu and Enterprise workspaces on flexible pricing buy workspace credits. The published rate card, in credits per million tokens (input / cached input / output):
- GPT-6 Astra — 250 / 25 / 1,250 (Fast mode is 2.5x)
- GPT-5.6 Sol — 100 / 10 / 500 (promotional through at least 21 November 2026)
- GPT-5.6 Terra — 50 / 5 / 300
- GPT-5.6 Luna — 5 / 0.5 / 30
- GPT-5.5–125 / 12.5 / 750
- GPT-Image-2–200 / 50 / 750 for image tokens
OpenAI’s own rule of thumb is that GPT-5.6 usage averages 5–30 credits per message. If you hit the limit mid-turn, the agent finishes the turn it is on. Voice in the desktop app draws from the same budget at $0.05 a minute (1.25 credits a minute on credit-billed workspaces). And anyone can run extra local sessions on an API key at standard API rates, which is the escape hatch for CI and shared environments.
Two dates to know: GPT-5.5 retires from Codex on 14 October 2026 on every plan, and the API is unaffected.
Five-hour windows, weekly caps, and /status in the CLI for your live remaining allowance.
What Codex pricing gets right
- A real free tier and an $8 entry point. You can evaluate Codex without a $20 commitment.
- Model-tiered limits let a Plus subscriber stretch the plan a long way by defaulting to Luna and Terra.
- Credits instead of forced upgrades when you overrun.
- Finish-the-turn grace — hitting the limit does not abandon a running task.
- An API-key path for automation, with usage-based billing and no plan required.
- Transparent rate card with per-model credit costs published.
Where Codex pricing falls short
- The ranges are enormous. “5–45 Astra messages” is not a budget; it is a warning.
- Cloud chats cost more and share the allowance, so the convenient path is the expensive one.
- Pro’s “from $100” hides a 20x tier priced separately, and the 5x/20x split is only explained in the docs.
- Everything shares one pool — images, voice, Excel, code review through GitHub — so non-coding features quietly eat coding limits.
- Weekly limits on top of five-hour windows mean a heavy Monday can cost you Friday.
Codex pricing vs the alternatives
Against per-token API billing, the ChatGPT plans are cheaper for most individuals until you run agents unattended for hours, at which point the API key wins on predictability. Against competing agent subscriptions, Codex pricing is competitive at Plus and expensive at Pro 20x. The real optimisation is not the plan — it is not spending Sol messages on work a template or a builder could have done.
Verdict: what should you pay for Codex in 2026?
Start on Free or Go to see whether Codex fits your workflow. Most working developers land on Plus at $20 and get the most from it by routing routine work to Luna and Terra and reserving Sol and Astra for hard problems. Move to Pro when you are hitting five-hour limits several times a week; use an API key for CI. Check the live tables on the official Codex pricing page before you commit, because the usage estimates move.
The alternative worth keeping next to it: Begin
The Codex pricing tables make one thing obvious: the expensive messages are the long agentic ones, and a surprising number of those are spent standing up a new project — auth, database, payments, deploy — before any interesting code exists. Begin removes that spend by producing a finished, deployed product from a sentence or a domain.
- One brief, four targets. Describe an app, or paste a URL, and Begin builds a website, an iOS app, an Android app or a Chrome extension on ordinary, readable code you keep working in.
- Batteries wired in. Sign-in, email, a database, storage and Stripe checkout are part of every project; each build goes live on Begin’s edge with TLS and your own domain.
- Credits you can predict. Every plan grants 100 credits a month; a first build costs 5, every change afterwards costs 1, failed builds are refunded, and unused credits roll over on paid plans. Five free credits — one real build — need no card.
- $49 and $99 tiers that differ on the workspace around the credits, not on what a credit buys.
Let Begin do the scaffolding at 5 credits. Spend your Codex Sol messages on the code that only you can specify — and keep Begin open for the next product.
Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash
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