ChatGPT and Codex may share one usage limit from December. What’s known

What the notice says

On October 29, 2026, Tibor Blaho, an engineer who regularly posts unreleased changes he finds in ChatGPT, shared what he called a “new hidden shared usage limit checkout disclaimer” in the ChatGPT web app. It reads: “Starting in December, plan usage will have a shared limit across all of ChatGPT and Codex.”

His screenshot shows the sentence at the end of a monthly plan’s terms, right after “Renews monthly until cancelled. €23.00/month (incl. tax) will be charged,” and followed by a “Learn more” link. A member of the Chinese forum LINUX DO found the same text in the checkout page’s code, as a default message: “Starting in December, plan usage will have a shared limit across all of ChatGPT and Codex. Learn more”.

The wording is OpenAI’s, written for its own checkout, which makes this more than a rumor. It isn’t an announcement, though. OpenAI’s release notes for October 29 and 30 don’t mention it, none of the help articles on usage we read on October 31 mention December, and we found no comment from OpenAI on the find. Strings in an app’s code can change or never ship.

What shares a limit today

ChatGPT has two kinds of limit now. Codex shares one allowance with OpenAI’s agent features: “Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT for Excel, and Workspace Agents use a shared allowance and credit pool when those features are available on your plan,” says its Codex help article. Chat keeps its own. “Usage and credit rules in Work and Codex are separate from Chat,” says the models article.

What you use	What it counts against today
Codex, in the app, CLI, IDE extension or cloud	The shared Work and Codex allowance
ChatGPT Work	The shared Work and Codex allowance
ChatGPT for Excel and Workspace Agents	The shared Work and Codex allowance, where your plan has them
Everyday text chats	Nothing: unlimited on Free, Go, Plus and Pro, “subject to abuse guardrails”
Thinking in Chat, Medium to Extra High	Chat’s own Thinking limits
GPT-6 Pro in Chat, on Pro plans	Its own weekly message limit
Voice in Chat	Its own limits
Your dot	Its own, “for now”

The rows come from OpenAI’s pricing page, which lists everyday text chats as “Unlimited” on Free, Go, Plus and Pro; its Pro tiers article, which says GPT-6 Pro’s message limits “are separate from your Work and Codex allowance”; the Codex help article, which says “Regular Chat Voice has separate limits and doesn’t consume Codex usage”; and Sottiaux’s October 29 post, as BleepingComputer quotes it: “usage of your dot will still continue to be separate from your default usage.”

Read literally, “all of ChatGPT” would put every row in one limit. OpenAI hasn’t said whether it means that, or how a chat would count against the same allowance as a Codex task.

Where it seems to come from

A day before the find, an X user posted a ChatGPT screen titled “Chat and Work, all in one place,” which offers to “Ask a quick question, create a slide deck, or take action in your apps from any conversation with Medium effort or higher,” and asked how that changes usage limits. OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux replied: “Team is working on this but it’s not rolling out just yet, sorry for any confusion. Plan is to bring together best of both Chat / Work capabilities together at some point this year, but we’re going to proceed carefully here and take our time. We’ll have more to share soon.” Blaho linked the two: “This is likely related to the ongoing work to combine Chat + Work.”

Anthropic has already gone this way. On September 16 it made “everything Claude Cowork does available from any conversation,” by its release notes, and its plans’ limits “are shared across Claude and Claude Code, meaning all activity in both tools counts against the same limits,” says its help center. Once any chat can start Work’s longer tasks, a line between Chat’s limits and Work’s gets hard to draw. That is our reading, not something OpenAI has said.

Who it would affect

• Codex users who also chat a lot. Today a long day of questions in Chat leaves your Codex allowance untouched. Under one limit, it would draw on the same allowance, unless OpenAI makes chats count lightly or the limit bigger. On Plus, that allowance also has a five-hour window.
• People who only chat. Everyday text chats are “Unlimited” on Free, Go, Plus and Pro today. The notice doesn’t say whether that survives.
• Pro subscribers. On October 29 OpenAI doubled the Work and Codex allowance on Pro 100 and Pro 500 and brought every Pro 200 plan up to the higher one, as our memo on it explains. Their GPT-6 Pro messages are counted separately today.
• Business, Enterprise and Edu. Nothing says whether workspaces change. Enterprise and Edu plans with flexible pricing already have “no fixed rate limits,” says OpenAI’s Codex pricing; their usage is paid for in credits.

What OpenAI hasn’t said

• Which plans. Codex is included on every ChatGPT plan, Free and Go among them.
• The day. “Starting in December” gives no date, and nothing says whether it waits for your renewal.
• The size. Whether the shared limit is larger than today’s Work and Codex allowance.
• How chats count. Whether a quick question costs anything at all, and how Thinking, GPT-6 Pro, voice and dots fit in.
• What “Learn more” links to. We found no public page about the change.

What to do now

1. Don’t change plans over it yet. Nothing changes before December, by the notice’s own words. OpenAI’s help center lists Plus at “$20/month (billed monthly)” with no annual option, and says “Pro is billed monthly,” so you can cancel before a renewal once OpenAI publishes the terms, if they don’t suit you.
2. Learn what a normal week uses. Settings > Usage in ChatGPT, or /status in the Codex CLI, shows your allowance and reset times. Knowing how much of it a typical week takes lets you see the difference if chats start to count.
3. Keep a fallback for code. Plus and Pro subscribers who reach their limit “can purchase additional credits to continue working,” and “All users may also run extra local chats using an API key, with usage charged at standard API rates,” says Codex’s pricing page. A second lab’s plan works too, such as Claude Code on a Claude plan, though Claude already shares one limit between chat and Claude Code.
4. Watch OpenAI’s release notes. That’s where it announced the October 29 changes to Pro.

When Codex runs out in the middle of a task

One limit or two, some weeks end early. Enjoy runs Codex on your ChatGPT plan, beside Claude Code, Antigravity, Grok Build, Muse Code and local models through OpenCode, and keeps the work going when a limit hits:

• Its usage meters show the limits Codex reports for each account, such as 5 hours and Weekly, with credits and free resets, before you start a big job.
• When Codex runs out, the conversation waits for the reset and carries on by itself, as long as the computer is awake and Enjoy is open. If you’ve signed in another ChatGPT account with usage left, it moves there instead.
• Or switch the conversation to another agent, such as Claude Code on a Claude plan or a free local model, and the new agent catches up on the work so far.

Enjoy doesn’t change OpenAI’s limits or add usage to a ChatGPT plan: each agent runs on the plan you already have. Enjoy is a monthly subscription, with the first seven days free (pricing).

We’ll update this memo when OpenAI announces the change, or says it won’t happen.