OpenAI merges ChatGPT and Codex into one token pool from December, angering Plus users

The change replaces separate per-product limits with one consolidated budget. Every non-Instant conversation and every Codex coding run now draws from the same pool. A developer who leans on Codex for refactoring will have less room for ordinary chat, and vice versa. The policy starts in December and covers the Plus, Pro and Business tiers.

The mechanics shift OpenAI from message-count limits toward token metering inside a subscription:

- Long-context or reasoning-heavy chats will consume the allowance faster than short exchanges.

- Agentic Codex jobs, which can chain many calls, become visibly expensive against the cap.

Community reaction was immediate:

- 'BREAKING: Usage will now be measured in tokens' (999 upvotes, 567 comments).

- 'Plus users, say bye to unlimited Chat' (349 upvotes).

- 'Happy Halloween! Make sure to say goodbye to usage!' on r/OpenAI (425 upvotes).

This is the week's dominant theme. xAI's Musk admitted Grok Bot costs are unsustainable. Anthropic moved Claude Code Pro to Haiku 5.5 by default. r/ChatGPTCoding users say they cannot plan capacity when 'one vendor cut usage overnight, another doubled after backlash'. Flat-rate AI subscriptions are colliding with agent-era compute costs, and every major lab is reaching for metering at roughly the same time.

What to watch:

- The actual token numbers per tier, which have not been published.

- Whether OpenAI adds top-up purchases.

- Whether churn pushes power users toward API billing or open alternatives like DeepSeek's Super-Agent.