Do you think that for someone who only needs careful, methodical identification of “problems” occasionally, like a couple of times per day, the $20/month plan gets you anywhere, or do you need the $200 plan just to get access to this?
I've had the $20/month plan for a few months alongside a max subscription to Claude; the cheap codex plan goes a really long way. I use it a few times a day for debugging, finding bugs, and reviewing my work. I've ran out of usage a couple of times, but only when I lean on it way more than I should.
I only ever use it on the high reasoning mode, for what it's worth. I'm sure it's even less of a problem if you turn it down.
Listening to Dario at the NYT DealBook summit, and reading between the lines a bit, it seems like he is basically saying Anthropic is trying to be a reponsible, sustainable business and charging customers accordingly, and insinuating that OpenAI is being much more reckless, financially.
I think it's difficult to estimate how profitable both are - depends too much on usage and that varies so much.
I think it is widely accepted that Anthropic is doing very well in enterprise adoption of Claude Code.
In most of those cases that is paid via API key not by subscription so the business model works differently - it doesn't rely on low usage users subsidizing high usage users.
OTOH OpenAI is way ahead on consumer usage - which also includes Codex even if most consumers don't use it.
I don't think it matters - just make use of the best model at the best price. At the moment Codex 5.2 seems best at the mid-price range, while Opus seems slightly stronger than Codex Max (but too expensive to use for many things).
