I didn’t even realize there were limits with the exception of the CLI codex until now. And now it appears the CLI version is less expensive… I think… this is really difficult to guage… I mean… It looks like I’m getting charged anywhere from $0.50 - $2.00 to run a codex task… More on community.openai.com

Codex - paid use in ChatGPT Are you over a new 5-hour usage limit and weekly usage limit with codex? Now you can pay up - a minimum amount for maximum breakage. Check out here: https://chatgpt.com/codex/settings/usage Enjoy having a plus or pro subscription, and then paying more by pre-purchasing ... More on community.openai.com

If you're trying to explore AI + n8n without spending much (or anything), here's what actually works right now: OpenAI still provides free tokens if you enable "share data for training" in your settings. Just make sure your account has a positive balance — even a small one — or the tokens won’t apply. OpenRouter has a bunch of models you can use without an API key. You can send HTTP requests directly from n8n. Models like LLaMA, DeepSeek, MythoMax, and others are available for free. Gemini API from Google gives free access to Gemini Flash (2.5). You can use it with an API key via Google AI Studio — generous daily limits and solid speed. Hugging Face offers some free inference credits if you're on a Pro plan. Not huge, but good enough for testing out flows. With this stack, you can already build working automations and demos without needing any paid API plans. More on reddit.com

Something similar happens with the warning messages about o3’s useage. I sometimes use it so extensively that it’s like “you have 25 messages left” then I finally stop when it gets to ~3 messages left (start wrapping up when the 5 messages left message comes up). I realize some other people likely aren’t going to do this with the credit system but if it’s clear exactly how many messages you can send to whatever, it makes a lot more sense for me especially if they give you a large amount of credits designed to be used over o3, deep research, and sora. I never use sora or deep research or anything aside from o3 really so I would just end up getting more use out of o3. However it’s OpenAI. They will likely give a small amount of credits and will likely squeeze us for more money and give back less plus the whole psychological tricks you mentioned where people are less likely to use their models. It is a great idea if implemented well, but it’s extremely difficult to implement it just right where people like me (who run up the limits every other day) and other people (who don’t use the model in case they need it in the future and end up not using it) are both satisfied and get their moneys worth. Maybe allowing rollover credits or creating an “emergency credit store” where you can store enough credits for 10-20 o3 messages, sora gens, deep researches or something and that isn’t used when the other credits run out by default. So the user would explicitly have to allow those credits to be used and hence will use the service more knowing they have emergency credits. Idk just an idea, there’s a way to implement this pretty well but there’s also a fair chance they end up alienating their user base. Me personally I’m against credit based usage because they tend to take more and give less, just look at some of these credit based ai sites, but the perception can be flipped. More on reddit.com