3 days of side project work is about all I had in me anyway

More like 2 hours considering these usage limits

I've been on 5x for a couple of months and the closest I've got to my weekly limits is 75%. I've hit 5-hr limits twice (expected). I'm a solo dev that uses CC anywhere from 8-12+ hr each day, 7 days a week. I've never experienced any of the issues others complain about other than the feeling that my sessions feel a little more rushed. I'd say that overall I have very dialed-in context management which includes: breaking work across sessions in atomic units, svelte claude.md/rules (sub 150 lines), periodic memory audit/cleanup, good pre-compact discipline, and a few great commands that I use to transfer knowledge effectively between sessions, without leaving a trailing pile of detritus. Some may say that this is exhaustive, but I don't find it much different than maintaining Agile discipline.

This being said, I know I'm an outlier.

Perhaps on the 10x plan.

It went through my $20 plan's session limit in 15 minutes, implementing two smallish features in an iOS app.

That was with the effort on auto.

It looks like full time work would require the 20x plan.

I know limits have been nerfed, but c'mon it's $20. The fact that you were able to implement two smallish features in an iOS app in 15 minutes seems like incredible value.

At $20/month your daily cost is $0.67 cents a day. Are you really complaining that you were able to get it to implement two small features in your app for 67 cents?

Yea, actually, people should be complaining.

If you got in a taxi, and they charged you relative to taking a horse carriage, people should be upset.

That last sentence didn't make sense so I'm not sure what your point is. But I'll run with the analogy.

You got into a taxi and they were charging you horse carriage prices initially. They're still not charging you for a full taxi ride but people are complaining because their (mistaken) assumption was that taxis can be provided as cheaply as horse carriages.

People are angry because their expectations were not managed properly which I understand.

But many of us realized that $20 or even $200 was far too low for such advanced capabilities and are not that surprised that all of the companies are raising prices and decreasing usage limits.

OpenAI is not far behind, they're simply taking their time because they're okay with burning through capital more quickly than Anthropic is, and because OpenAI's clearly stated ambition is to win market share, not to be a responsibly, sustainably run company.

Shortly after I ran out of credits in 15 min, they tweeted that they increased usage limits to compensate for the higher token usage, so perhaps it is not as bad now.

Codex, this afternoon, I was able to use for like two hours on the $20 plan. Maybe limits will be tighter in the future. But with new data centers, new GPU generations, and research advances it might rather get cheaper.

Anyway, as you said, this is all pretty cheap. I'll go with the $100 Codex plan, since I now figured out how to nicely work on multiple changes in parallel via the Codex app with worktrees. I imagine the same is possible in Claude Code.

It seems to me a bit naive to think OpenAI would not increase prices/decrease usage limits at some point. $20 might cover a very small fraction of the actual cost that is incurred over a month of sustained usage.

No, I am happy with the results.

For a first test, it did seem like it burned through the usage even faster than usual.

GitHub Copilot’s 7.5x billing factor over 3x with Opus 4.6 seems to suggest it indeed consumes more tokens.

Now I’m just waiting for OpenAI to show their hand before deciding which of the plans to upgrade from the $20 to the $100 plan.

> It looks like full time work would require the 20x plan.

Full time work where you have the LLM do all the code has always required the larger plans.

The $20/month plans are for occasional use as an assistant. If you want to do all of your work through the LLM you have to pay for the higher tiers.

The Codex $20/month plan has higher limits, but in my experience the lower quality output leaves me rewriting more of it anyway so it's not a net win.

Exactly. God, it wouldn't be such a problem if they didn't gaslight you and act like it was nothing. Just put up a banner that says Claude is experiencing overloaded capacity right now, so your responses might be whatever.

Clearly you didn't try it yet ;)

... your side projects that will soon become your main source of income after you are laid off because corporate bosses have noticed that engineers are more productive...