Codex Usage Resets, $100 Plan Amid Reliability Fixes
20 Jul 2026
What happened
OpenAI reset Codex usage limits for paid users, including ChatGPT Work customers, as part of a broader wave of updates that also introduced a new $100 Codex plan, the ability to access banked resets from web and mobile, and the launch of Codex plugins. The changes arrived alongside a string of reliability incidents that have drawn attention to platform stability.
According to the report, 500k users received a banked reset tied to this update, though a caching issue affected less than 10% of them. Separately, a promotional 2X usage-limit increase — set to run through January 1st — failed to apply for an estimated 9% of Plus and Pro users, an issue that remained under investigation for 1-3 days.
By the numbers
- 35 total Codex usage-limit resets have now been tracked, with an average interval of 8.9 days between resets and a longest gap of 67.7 days.
- 500k users received a banked reset; under 10% of them were hit by a related caching issue.
- 9% of Plus/Pro users were estimated to have missed the 2X promotional usage bump.
- Active user figures of 9M, 8M, and 7M were referenced across separate milestone announcements, while weekly Codex users were cited growing from 2M to 3M at another growth milestone.
- A request-blocking issue — flagged internally as high cyber risk — was fixed in roughly 8 minutes.
- A separate Codex incident lasted 10 minutes, and 3 additional smaller incidents occurred within a 24-hour span.
The report does not clarify the chronological relationship between the 9M/8M/7M active-user figures, nor whether the 2M-to-3M weekly-user milestone refers to the same underlying metric or a distinct one.
Reliability bumps in the road
The rollout wasn't friction-free. An optimization rollback was found to affect cache hit rates during long-running sessions, a change that could degrade performance for extended-use workflows. Separately, Codex requests were temporarily blocked and rejected after an introduced issue triggered a high-cyber-risk classification — resolved quickly, in about 8 minutes, but notable given the flag's severity. No explanation is provided in the report for why the issue was classified as high cyber risk.
On top of that, a 10-minute outage and three smaller incidents within a single 24-hour window point to a pattern of reliability hiccups rather than an isolated event.
New plans and features
Alongside the resets, OpenAI introduced a $100 Codex plan with substantially more included usage, aimed at teams with heavier workloads. It's unclear from the report whether this tier is a permanent addition or tied specifically to the current promotional window. Banked resets are now accessible from both web and mobile, and Codex plugins have launched, potentially opening new extensibility options for developers building on the platform.
Why founders should care
For startups building on Codex or ChatGPT Work, these updates carry mixed signals. The frequency of reliability incidents — an outage, three smaller disruptions in a day, a cache-related performance issue, and a request-blocking bug — suggests it's plausible that teams leaning heavily on Codex for production workflows may want to build in usage buffers or fallback plans rather than assume uninterrupted access.
The introduction of a $100 tier likely signals that OpenAI is segmenting pricing for higher-usage teams, and founders currently on lower tiers may benefit from comparing costs before committing to long-term workflows built around current plan limits. Given that usage caps and promotional terms (like the 2X boost ending January 1st) have already shifted multiple times — with 35 resets tracked and issues affecting both banked resets and promotional limits — it's reasonable to expect billing and usage policies for Codex to keep evolving in the near term, making it worth monitoring before locking in dependencies.
On the upside, the rollout of Codex plugins could offer a plausible path for founders looking to extend Codex into internal tooling, though the report offers no further detail on plugin capabilities or availability.
What's still unclear
The report leaves several gaps: the root cause of the banked-reset caching issue isn't explained, remediation steps for the 9% of promo-affected users aren't detailed, and it's unclear whether the $100 plan will outlast the current promotional period. No conflicting figures were flagged across sources, but the relationship between the various active-user milestones (9M, 8M, 7M, and the 2M-to-3M weekly figures) remains ambiguous.