ChatGPT Plus vs Pro for Codex in 2026: which plan to buy, and when

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product. We checked every plan and price below against OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s own pages on October 30, 2026, and we say where you don’t need Enjoy at all, which is most of the time.

ChatGPT’s plans for Codex, compared

Codex’s pricing says “Codex is included in your ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise plan,” and OpenAI’s pricing guide adds that “ChatGPT Work and Codex share usage.” Free and Go get “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout,” so for real coding the choice starts at Plus. These are the ways to pay for it, side by side.

Option	Best for	Price, checked October 30, 2026	Codex usage	Five-hour limit
ChatGPT Plus	A few focused sessions a week	$20 a month	The Plus allowance	Yes, plus weekly limits
Pro 100	Running out of Plus most weeks	$100 a month	About 10 times Plus	None
Pro 200	Several agents, most days	$200 a month	About 20 times Plus	None
Pro 500	The most usage, and Ultrafast	$500 a month	About 50 times Plus	None
Your plan plus credits or an instant reset	Running out now and then	Your plan, plus what you buy	Pay as you go	Your plan’s
ChatGPT Business	Two or more people who want one bill	Standard $20 a user a month billed yearly, or $25 monthly	Standard as Plus; Premium more	Standard yes; Premium none
An OpenAI API key	Automation, CI and uneven use	Per token, at API rates	No plan limits	None
ChatGPT Plus plus Claude Pro	Two labs’ limits for $40	$20 plus $20 a month	Each plan’s own	Each plan’s own
Enjoy, with any of the above	Moving a conversation between accounts and agents	A monthly subscription on top of your plans, free for 7 days (pricing)	Your plans’	Your plans’

Prices are in US dollars, before tax. The multiples of Plus are approximate, and they’re our arithmetic, because OpenAI’s own pages don’t state them; the next section explains where they come from. OpenAI’s Pro help article says “Pro is billed monthly. Annual billing and payment for multiple months in advance are not available.”

What every plan shares, and what changed on October 29

Codex has no message count on any plan. “Your allowance does not correspond to a fixed number of messages or tasks,” says OpenAI’s usage guide, and the pricing guide warns that “Tasks that look similar can consume different amounts of your allowance.” Long chats in ChatGPT Work come out of the same allowance as coding.

The Pro plans’ size moved this month. OpenAI’s September email to Pro 200 subscribers put that plan at “20 times” the Plus allowance and Pro 500 at “25 times the usage of Plus,” and Pro 100 launched in April at five times Plus, as VentureBeat reported. On October 29, OpenAI’s release notes said “Pro 100 and Pro 500 plans now include twice their previous Work and Codex allowance,” and canceled a planned cut to Pro 200. Doubled, that’s about 10, 20 and 50 times Plus. Our news post has the details.

What OpenAI’s help center does say is the order: “Pro 200 includes more usage than Pro 100. Pro 500 offers the highest included usage of the three plans.” And “Plus usage is unchanged.”

ChatGPT Plus

Best for: coding with Codex a few sessions a week, or trying it before you commit.

OpenAI’s one-line description of Plus is “Power a few focused coding sessions each week.” It includes “Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS,” cloud code review, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, and GPT-6 Astra in Work and Codex, though “not GPT-6 Pro in Chat.”

Price: $20 a month.

Watch for: Plus has both limits. “Where both apply, you need allowance remaining in both to continue,” and “You may reach the five-hour limit before five hours have passed, even if you still have weekly usage remaining.” OpenAI estimates 15 to 160 local messages every five hours with GPT-6.1 Sol and 5 to 45 with GPT-6 Astra, and says those “are not fixed message limits” and “weekly limits may also apply.”

Pro 100

Best for: running out of Plus most weeks, not once in a while.

Pro is “Everything in Plus,” with “Longer Codex and ChatGPT Work sessions,” GPT-6 Pro in Chat and dots. For Codex, the change that matters most is the clock: “Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 currently have no five-hour usage limit in Work and Codex,” so you can spend the week’s allowance on one long day. It also comes with $100 a month of API credits, for building on OpenAI’s API.

Price: $100 a month.

Watch for: “A larger allowance does not guarantee twice as many completed tasks,” because usage “depends on the model, the amount of context processed, reasoning, tool use, information retrieval, caching, and speed mode.” Fast mode uses the allowance “at 2.5 times the rate.” And the API credits come with conditions: ChatGPT’s pricing says “Activation and eligibility requirements apply” and “Unused credits expire at the end of the applicable billing cycle.”

Pro 200

Best for: several Codex agents running most days.

Pro 200 has the same features as Pro 100 and twice its price, and since October 29, roughly twice its allowance again. Subscribers who were moved to a smaller allowance in September got it back: “If you had the lower allowance, it has doubled to match.”

Price: $200 a month, with $200 a month of API credits.

Watch for: it doesn’t include Ultrafast. OpenAI says “Your subscription remains Pro 200. Ultrafast is available only on Pro 500.” By the figures above, Pro 100 and Pro 200 now cost the same per Plus-sized allowance, so move up only if a Pro 100 week runs out.

Pro 500

Best for: the most Codex usage OpenAI sells to one person, and Ultrafast.

Pro 500 “offers the highest included usage of the three plans,” and Ultrafast for GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol.

Price: $500 a month, with $500 a month of API credits.

Watch for: Ultrafast “uses your plan’s included usage first at 8× the Standard rate,” so an Ultrafast week is an eighth as long. If you bought Pro 500 only for its usage, see whether Pro 200 is enough.

Your plan plus credits or an instant reset

Best for: running out now and then, when an upgrade would sit unused most weeks.

“ChatGPT Plus and Pro users who reach their usage limit can purchase additional credits to continue working without needing to upgrade their existing plan,” says the pricing guide. Credits are used after your included usage, and you buy them in Settings > Usage in ChatGPT or Usage & Billing in the Codex app. An instant reset instead “immediately restores both 5-hour and weekly usage.”

Price: credits are priced per million tokens, such as 50 credits in and 250 out for GPT-6.1 Sol, and OpenAI’s September email valued 62,500 credits at “$2,500 USD,” 4 cents each. An instant reset’s price appears at checkout.

Watch for: credits are “non-refundable” and “valid for 12 months from purchase.” A reset “pulls your normal weekly allowance forward rather than adding a separate usage entitlement,” starts a new week with your next request, and “Generally, we do not offer refunds for weekly limit reset purchases.”

ChatGPT Business

Best for: two or more people who want one bill and an admin.

Business is $20 a user a month billed yearly for two or more users, or $25 monthly. Its Standard seats get the same five-hour estimates as Plus. Premium seats, says OpenAI’s Business article, “have higher included usage for Work and Codex and no five-hour usage limit,” and OpenAI’s October 29 notes raised them too, without a figure.

Watch for: the pages we read give no price or multiple for Premium seats, and Business needs at least two users, so for one person Pro is the simpler buy.

An OpenAI API key

Best for: automation, CI, and use too uneven for a plan.

OpenAI calls an API key “Great for automation in shared environments like CI.” Codex runs on it “in the CLI, SDK, or IDE extension,” billed per token at API prices, with no plan limits.

Watch for: “No cloud-based features (GitHub code review, Slack, etc.),” and “Model availability follows the API models available to your key.” OpenAI also warns that “API token prices are separate from subscription usage; don’t use them to estimate included tasks.”

ChatGPT Plus plus Claude Pro

Best for: two labs’ limits for less than Pro 100, and a second opinion on hard code.

OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s limits are separate, so when Codex runs out, Claude Code still works. Claude’s pricing says “Claude Code is included in all paid plans,” and Pro is $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly. Our Claude Code vs Codex guide compares the two agents.

Price: $40 a month, or $37 with Claude Pro billed yearly.

Watch for: each agent keeps its own conversations, so when you move a task, you tell the second agent where things stand. And a second ChatGPT Plus account isn’t the same trick: OpenAI says it “limits how many paid accounts you can use on one device,” and a blocked account sees Device limit reached, per its device limits article. Its terms also forbid trying to “circumvent any rate limits or restrictions.”

Enjoy, with any of these

Best for: getting the most from the plans you buy, and moving a conversation across them when one runs out.

Enjoy isn’t a ChatGPT plan: it runs Codex, Claude Code, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, on the plans you already have. What it adds to this choice:

• It shows what’s left. Its usage meters show the limits Codex reports for each account, such as 5 hours and Weekly, with your credits, free resets and when each limit resets, before you start a big job.
• It keeps going through limits. When Codex runs out, the conversation waits for the reset and carries on by itself, and offers Use a reset when OpenAI has given your account a free one.
• It hands the conversation to another agent. Plus plus Claude Pro works better when Claude Code gets the conversation so far instead of starting cold.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and your other computers, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy doesn’t change OpenAI’s limits or add GPT to a Claude plan: each agent runs on its own lab’s plan, which you pay for. Its plan suggestions cover Claude Code on Max, not ChatGPT plans. Waiting for a reset needs your computer on with Enjoy open, and scheduled workflows run only while it’s awake with Enjoy open. Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends.

When to stay on the plan you have

If you’re on Plus and run out once or twice a month, stay. A five-hour limit clears by itself, OpenAI sometimes gives Codex accounts free resets, and credits cover the odd afternoon, as our usage limit guide explains. Spending less helps too: Codex’s pricing page says “switching to a lower-cost model can help your allowance last longer,” and GPT-6.1 Terra’s estimate on Plus is 35 to 285 local messages every five hours, against Sol’s 15 to 160.

If you’re on Pro 200 and rarely use half your week, Pro 100 may do, now that it has doubled. If you’re on Pro 100 and run out every week, Pro 200 is the next size. Upgrade when it happens most weeks, not after one bad one.

How we compared

We read OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Codex pricing pages, its help center articles on Pro, usage, credits, resets, Business, accounts and device limits, its October 29 release notes, and Claude’s pricing on October 30, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote each company’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t published, including message counts and Pro’s multiples, which we work out from OpenAI’s email and its October 29 notes and label as approximate. Plans and limits change often, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.