Codex is a rate limit, not a rate. Plus gives 15 to 160 Sol messages per 5-hour window. Planner for Plus, Pro 100, 200 and 500, solo dev and team of five.
Codex has no price per task, only a rolling 5-hour window and a weekly cap, and the same Plus plan gives you anywhere from 15 to 160 GPT-6.1 Sol messages per window. OpenAI sells no separate Codex subscription. It is included in ChatGPT plans from $0 to $500 a month, so what you buy is an allowance, and what you plan is how fast you burn it.
Short answer: a solo developer who codes with Codex a few hours a day fits on Plus at $20 or Pro at $100, and moves to Pro 500 only if Ultrafast speed is worth burning the allowance eight times faster. A five-person team is cheaper per head on Business at $20 a user billed annually than on five Pro 100 seats, but the allowance per seat is the Plus-sized one. The API-key path is billed per token, has no window, and skips cloud features such as GitHub review and Slack. The numbers below come from OpenAI's help pages and October coverage; the planner math is mine and labelled as derived.
A rate limit is not a rate
Per-token APIs price what you use. Codex plans price access to a pool. Since April 2026 OpenAI meters Codex as token credits against a rolling 5-hour window plus a weekly cap. The 5-hour window is the one you feel: you hit it mid-afternoon, wait, and carry on. The weekly cap is the one that ends your Thursday.
The message counts people quote are estimates, not guarantees. OpenAI publishes ranges per model, and the range is wide because a message that reads one file costs far less than a message that rewrites a module. Cloud tasks are the sharper edge: OpenAI says cloud chats may use more allowance than local messages, and you cannot change the default model for Codex cloud chats. I could not find a published weekly cap figure in my sources, so I do not give one.
When you run past the window you can buy credits. The going estimate is about $0.04 per credit. That makes overflow predictable in dollars even when the messages-per-credit rate is not, and it sets a ceiling on how much a bad day costs you. Credits bought on Pro 100 or Pro 200 do not unlock the Pro 500 Ultrafast model.
The plans and what a window buys
| Plan | Price | Allowance relative to Plus | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Smallest | Entry access |
| Go | $8 a month | Small | Entry paid tier |
| Plus | $20 a month | 1x | Cloud floor; Linear and Slack integrations need a paid plan |
| Pro 100 | $100 a month | About 5x | Pro is quoted as 5x Plus |
| Pro 200 | $200 a month | Reported 10x from 30 Oct 2026 | Reopened; sources disagree on the date, one says grandfathered to 29 Oct |
| Pro 500 | $500 a month | 25x | Includes GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast: 8x faster token generation, 8x allowance burn |
| Business | $20 per user a month annual, $25 monthly | Plus-sized per seat | Two or more users |
October guidance puts the Plus and standard Business 5-hour window at these message ranges:
| Model | Messages per 5-hour window (Plus) | Derived: Pro 100 (5x) |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra | 5 to 45 | 25 to 225 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 15 to 160 | 75 to 800 |
| GPT-6 Sol | 15 to 150 | 75 to 750 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 350 to 3,000 | 1,750 to 15,000 |
The Pro 100 column is my multiplication of OpenAI's stated 5x, not a published figure. Treat it as a planning number. Older Sol, Terra and Luna generation estimates were 10 to 100, 25 to 200 and 250 to 2,000 for Plus, which shows how much these ranges move when the models change. Re-read the help page each quarter.
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