“Instant chat will not draw from your usage”: OpenAI joins ChatGPT and Codex limits in December
OpenAI says ChatGPT and Codex will share one token-based usage allowance from December for Plus, Pro and Business subscribers. The change will bring more ChatGPT activity into the same pool as the coding agent, but there is an exception: “Instant chat will not draw from your usage,” OpenAI says.
How quickly the allowance is used will depend on the model and the task. More advanced models and complex requests generally consume more, OpenAI says.
For people who use both a chatbot and Codex, that means the work they ask ChatGPT to do could leave less of the shared allowance for coding, and vice versa. OpenAI has not published the size of each plan’s new allowance in the notice, so it is too early to calculate how many requests it will cover.
The change is planned for December. Image: OpenAI
More ChatGPT work will count towards the shared allowance
Codex and ChatGPT Work already draw from an allowance shared by the two products. OpenAI’s current guidance says the amount of work that covers depends on the plan, model, task and settings. Its December notice extends the shared allowance across ChatGPT and Codex as Work’s agentic capabilities move into the main ChatGPT experience.
The notice names Plus, Pro and Business. It does not list Free, Go, Enterprise or Edu, nor does it give a specific December start date or a complete breakdown of the ChatGPT features that will count. Instant chat is the one explicit exception.
Usage will be measured in tokens, the units a model processes and generates. A token is not the same thing as a message: a longer, more demanding request can consume a different amount from a short one, and OpenAI says the model choice affects consumption too.
Subscribers will be able to check the combined allowance
OpenAI says subscribers will be able to see their combined remaining usage and reset times under Settings → Usage. If they reach a limit, the options include waiting for the reset, upgrading their plan or buying credits for eligible features.
The company says it expects most users will not need to wait for a reset more often than they do now. That is an expectation rather than a guarantee for every user, and the notice does not provide a plan-by-plan comparison of the current and future limits.
The December change is separate from OpenAI’s recent decision to cancel a planned Pro 200 allowance reduction and increase certain Pro Work and Codex allowances. Those existing changes concern current usage; the combined ChatGPT and Codex allowance is still ahead.
