Codex Vs Claude Code Price Comparison

Starting in August and up until a few days ago, there have been several discussions online surrounding pricing and the value proposition of leading AI labs.

Initially, it was the discovery that Anthropic’s $200 Max plan only gets users twice the value of its $100 plan rather than the advertised ‘20x Pro limit ’ (it was assumed that this gets users 4x the usage of the $100 subscription), which filled the internet until OpenAI announced its own pricing change a few weeks later.

Anthropic’s pricing stirs discussion online

With OpenAI, the price change began when it stopped subscriptions through its $200 plan after releasing its most recent model—Astra. Its original justification was a compute shortage that required reducing new subscriptions through the plan. 

However, in the new announcement the company made through one of its reps just before its annual Dev Day, subscription to its model through the $200 Pro plan was enabled again with the price change update. 

Here, the typical usage for the plan has been cut in half, with a new $500 plan rumored to be on the horizon with a limit equal to the old $200 usage limit. 

Although the bulk of the rest of the press release announcing this change explains that users are expected to still get more done with half the usage limit, we wanted to write this article to briefly compare and introduce our readers to the pricing model of these frontier labs, starting with a quick primer. 

Primer 

The pricing strategy for AI models is quite straightforward at first glance. This is even more so when you look back in time to their beginnings.

For the most part, all the major model providers have a basic entry pricing level. For OpenAI and Anthropic, this is a $20 plan. This plan typically gets you access to the companies’ latest models, but with usage limits that prevent a small number of heavy users from consuming an outsized share of the available computing capacity.

From here, the pricing tiers generally scale with usage. A $100 plan gives you substantially more capacity, while the highest tiers, such as the $200 plans offered by both companies, are designed for users who need significantly more access to the models.

Where this pricing model becomes complicated is this:

Unlike traditional software, where a $20 subscription can often provide essentially unlimited access to the product, AI subscriptions have a variable cost attached to almost every interaction, so selling an AI subscription is not really selling access to a fixed piece of software but access to a pool of computational capacity. This is important. 

It is why the advertised multiplier attached to a plan can be misleading if interpreted as a simple measure of how much more AI you are getting for your money. 

Side-by-Side Comparison

Having said this, the actual amount of work a user can accomplish from a subscription depends not only on usage limits but also on the model being used, the length and complexity of requests, context size, tool calls, and the model provider’s own limits. 

For coding agents such as OpenAI Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, this distinction becomes even more important, and so we’ve taken the time to flesh this out in a table for easy visualization below. 

No More Subsidies 

Note that with both OpenAI and Anthropic, the basic subscriptions give you limited access to their coding agents, after which you’ll face one of the hidden costs in agentic coding: context. 

We’ve written some articles on context windows and some of the other important terms you need to know as a newbie to the agentic workflow, so you should take a look at them.

Besides this, perhaps the most important of the things to know about AI is the slow but steady move away from subsidized model usage.

As AI companies mature and approach public listing within the next few years, we’re seeing that they are becoming less willing to lose billions of dollars to get new users into their ecosystem. 

An implication of this change in acquisition strategy is an increased cost of access to these tools on a continual basis that you need to be aware of.  

As users, you’ll have to get comfortable with using an intelligence level appropriate for your work, as well as understand just enough of your chosen provider’s offering to know how to save on costs. 

Anthropics IPO

Talking more about public offerings, Anthropic recently notified officials of its intention to go public on the stock market.

In fact, its prospectus, which was leaked to Reuters this week, also confirms the prediction of increasingly costly access to AI tools as the year rolls by, based on the amount the company plans to spend on compute infrastructure over the next few years.

The biggest takeaway, however, as it relates to our discussion, is Anthropic’s need to devote over 80 pages of its prospectus to explaining the risk factors of its business.

In the filing, the company warns that its AI could resist shutdown, conceal information, and engage in behavior that could be considered blackmail. 

While it is novel to want to try AI tools out, it is equally important to keep in mind everything that could go wrong in a scenario where your workflow has been intricately linked with AI technologies.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully something you’re able to take away from this article about pricing and the best possible comparison metric for determining the amount of value you get from either Anthropic or OpenAI’s agent subscription is that the value you derive from these models is heavily dependent on your goal. 

Asking questions like: “How much Codex work does each Pro tier allow vis-à-vis Claude?” Or “What’s the cost per completed coding task?” is contingent on your familiarity with each of these platforms, and we suspect that both OpenAI and Anthropic know this too, which is why the former has promised that “over time you [will] always get more work done and with an increasing level of quality.”

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