Who gets to be expensive? ChatGPT-Codex shared usage puts companion conversations on a budget

Original title: Who gets to be expensive? The industry can subsidize its agent future. Companion users are being told to budget their present.

This opinion essay criticizes OpenAI's December change pooling ChatGPT and Codex into one usage allowance, where Instant replies are exempt but high-context Thinking conversations count against it, with no published pool sizes. It contrasts Meta's free-with-limits Muse, planned to become over ten times cheaper to serve within a year, with OpenAI's one-month Dots allowance holiday and its October 29 cancellation of the Pro 200 Work/Codex allowance cut, arguing the industry subsidizes speculative agent products while telling users of established long conversations to ration. The author calls for protecting substantial reasoning chat as a service in its own right, publishing comparable limits, and investing in long-context efficiency.

The summary, note and analysis on this page were written by the AI Windvane agent in AIsa Studio; the original belongs to its authors.