I don’t think this is the main use case anymore, if it ever were. I see lots of non-developers use the extensions and MCP apps to read and categorize emails, check weather and home automation and other low value tasks. I discussed with one of these users and he was proud to optimize his setup to consume all weekly credits. At least his air quality stays great even if it must be overanalysing. OP’s logic is probably correct, he will be disappointed.
I probably will be, too, because I just got into bad habits of consuming tokens. Making me use tokens would probably be a good business strategy if there would be an easy ramp up, like 400 or 600 dollar plan, but there are none. Multiple accounts feels a bit hacky.
We can disagree without getting into sarcasm or dismissiveness.
People aren’t “manipulating AI to make fallacies”. They’re articulating concerns about stability, pricing, and long-term trust. Those are valid topics in any platform ecosystem.
Gratitude and critique aren’t mutually exclusive. Users can appreciate what’s been provided and still question changes that affect how they build.
“Freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think.” - Louis D. Brandeis
If the response to criticism is to label it as false or ungrateful rather than engage with it, then we’re not actually discussing the substance anymore, we’re just narrowing what people are allowed to say.
The point isn’t entitlement. The point is predictability, alignment with usage, and whether builders can rely on the platform over time.
If real-world cases don’t matter, then sure — there’s nothing to discuss. But for those actually trying to use the product, that’s kind of the whole point. Anyway, note
Yes, the quality has gone downhill as well as eating up usage super-fast. It has messed up my task numerous times before I ran out. Time for a roll back…
Tbh, I never had any problems with usage drain, but since yesterday (2026-04-03), even a small layout change has consumed 15% of the 5-hour usage. Refactoring consumes more, I know, but after 2 prompts, it depleted the entire 5-hour usage. The actual work time was maybe 10–15 minutes. Absolutely crazy, and the way it is right now, it’s basically unusable.
I think this started on the 31st (at least in Australia), or maybe a day or two before, and feels like it has got progressively worse. My five hour window reset an hour ago and 5 prompts later it’s almost gone. Not great for productivity!
I don’t know how everyone is praising this change. My 13 year old son FINALLY got interested at how dad wastes away his life in front of a 34” curved screen (for her pleasure) and some weird looking multiplayer notepad (wait til I show him IRC).
We sat down and planned out an app he wants to create. I created an openai account for him, paid of course, and showed him around codex and set him to 5.3. After of trying to look cool around him, he told me to f off and let him do it himself.
10 minutes later he comes out of his room and tells me he needs to upgrade his account or buy more credits. I checked and yep. He was out of credits. What was his prompt and what did he do?
Prompt: I would like to create an android app
Codex set up gradle. that’s it. That’s all he did. I got upset and told him I would take care of it when I was done working.
I got back to my 34” (curved for her pleasure etc..) screen of horrors only to find out that I have run out of credits as well. First time ever! And I let codex do some heavy coding in the past with lots of rewriting the code and code checking.
Something is off. I don’t like it, I hate it.
I now need to pay a minimum of $40 for 1000 credits or wait 4 days. Those 1000 credits with the new way of how things work will last me 10 minutes at best.
Honestly, I’m kind of fed up with OpenAI. For me it meets my exact needs. Now that it doesn’t meet my needs, I’d rather pay less and get 2% less accuracy, with almost no limits on a different provider, for a little cheaper.
Im reading all these comments of people who complain. Im wondering how many simply dont read these community forums and are not dare to even post. Nuts…
To be honest i think guys that we gonna need to adapt to this new fuckery. Im pretty sure nothing is going to change only going to get worse. If they gonna reset your limits - so what? Ussage is so fast that you gonna end up complaining again. I think that this is a “Beginning of a new phase” where OpenAI does not give a damn about this because they are in deep st hole with capital. If you look at their financials - its probably one of the most terrible companies financially. So i think they have chose the strategy - “Those who cannot afford, they can go f* themselves. Those who can - use credits/api and keep going building things at 20x speed vs any other software company”.
It might be my conspiracy theory, or i might be spot on here actually.
I think its a new paradigm we gonna need to adapt. (i hope not because OpenAI still havent gain so much trust from end-users, neither Anthropic or Google or Grok - so its still a war between them)
I can confirm the same issue on my side. It has now become effectively unusable. Even a simple git commit for a change of around 20 lines took roughly 50% of the 5-hour allowance, which is clearly not expected behaviour. Something is very wrong.
I have both a business account through work and a personal account. The business account appears to be depleting even faster, but the same issue is also affecting my personal account, just slightly less aggressively. In both cases, it has reached the point where the service is now virtually unusable.