Codex resets turned 12 days of a $100 plan into $1,211 of usage
Updated October 9, 2026 · first published October 9, 2026
Twelve days of ChatGPT Pro $100 costs about $40. In those 12 days we pulled $1,211 of API-priced Codex out of it. The plan did not do that. The resets did. Without them, the most 12 days could have held is two weekly windows, about $351. With two global resets and five banked resets, we got eight.
- Return on the plan: about 30x the prorated cost.
- Share of value that came from resets: about 71%.
- Fastest window: 7.2 hours from 0% to 100%.
The gauge, hour by hour
This is the Codex weekly gauge for every hour we used it. Each drop to zero is a reset. B marks a banked reset we redeemed; G marks a global reset OpenAI pushed to everyone. A normal week would show one slow climb. Ours shows eight.
Note the drop on October 2. We redeemed a banked reset at 08:49, used 14% of it, and twelve hours later a global reset replaced it. That cost us about $150 of value, and it is why we wrote a guide to when to redeem a banked reset.
What the plan would have delivered without resets
A Codex weekly window starts with your first request and lasts 7 days. Our first Pro window opened on September 27 at 13:26 UTC, so with no resets the second would have opened on October 4 and the 12 days would have ended partway through it. At our measured $175 per full window, the ceiling is about $351, and that assumes we used every bit of both.
| Scenario | Windows in 12 days | API value | Per $1 of plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro $100, no resets (ceiling) | 2 | $351 | $9 |
| Pro $100, the resets we used | 8 | $1,211 | $30 |
| Plus, no resets (for scale) | 2 | $134 | $17 |
How the math works
Codex writes a JSONL log of every session under ~/.codex/sessions/. Each request records cumulative input, cached input and output tokens, plus the weekly gauge (used_percent) and its resets_at time. We priced every request's token delta at the API list price of the model it ran on and grouped requests by weekly window. Dollar figures are API-equivalent value, not money we paid.
The prorated cost is $100 a month times 12/30, or $40. The no-reset ceiling is two full windows at our median of $175. The hourly series is in codex-pro-100-hourly.csv (gauge percentage plus cumulative API value, cached and uncached) and the windows in codex-pro-100-windows.csv.
Can you count on resets?
No. Public trackers have logged 59 resets since September 2025, and the pace sped up sharply this summer: 12 in July, 10 in August, 7 in September. But OpenAI has never promised them, and the gap between resets has been as long as 67 days. Price your plan on the no-reset line and treat everything above it as a bonus. Our Codex reset log has the dated list.
The multiplier matters too. A full Pro $100 window held 2.6x a Plus week, not 5x (details here). Resets are what made the plan a bargain, not the plan.
Sources
- codex-resets.com: public Codex reset tracker
- OpenAI Help Center: paid weekly Work and Codex rate limit resets
- When AI Reset: OpenAI reset of October 2, 2026
- OpenAI: Codex plans and usage limits
- OpenAI API pricing
Related
- ChatGPT Pro $100 is really 2.6x Plus
- When to redeem a Codex banked reset
- 8 Codex weekly windows in 12 days
- Codex reset log
- 97% of our Codex input was cached
- OpenAI halved ChatGPT Pro $200
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