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Codex resets turned 12 days of a $100 plan into $1,211 of usage

Updated October 9, 2026 · first published October 9, 2026

Quick answer: 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...

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.

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.

Codex weekly gauge, hour by hour, Sep 27 to Oct 8 (B = banked reset, G = global reset)0%25%50%75%100%Sep 28Sep 30Oct 2Oct 4Oct 6Oct 8BBBBGGB
Codex weekly gauge, hour by hour, Sep 27 to Oct 8 (B = banked reset, G = global reset)

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.

Cumulative API value: with resets vs the most a no-reset plan could hold vs what the plan cost$0$200$400$600$800$1,000$1,200$1,400Sep 28Sep 30Oct 2Oct 4Oct 6Oct 8With resets: $1,211No resets, ceiling: $351Plan cost: $40
Cumulative API value: with resets vs the most a no-reset plan could hold vs what the plan cost
ScenarioWindows in 12 daysAPI valuePer $1 of plan
Pro $100, no resets (ceiling)2$351$9
Pro $100, the resets we used8$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

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