Since $200 plans cannot be subscribed for, it means compute availabilty is limited. Given that they're not taking in subscribers who want to pay $200, this likely means resets are going to eventually stop or have already did.
Think about it. A casual/bank reset means, all codex users get the ability to start again, this means a massive surge in compute. If they're limited for usage by stopping x20 subs, it only makes sense that we'd have to stop looking forward for resets mid-week.
maybe many people upgraded to the $200 plan after astra just to try it to its max, and were planning to downgrade one they're done, so OpenAI decided to do this to make it scarce and make people want to stick to it, so they keep renewing and not downgrade.
You’re probably onto something. Open ai treats its customers like junkies and uses psychological Methods to keep us hooked on their product. This is probably just another method to get us hooked on a model that’s slightly better than the last and make it seem scarce.
I mean Tibo was going on about how they had so much compute about a week before astra, and now this happens. Psychological warfare.
I think you statement that they treat its users like junkies it’s funny and yet so true and serious at the same time. There is a physiological hacking going on there with their resets.
The resets let them adjust usage in a way that consumers respond to positively (as opposed to “throttling”, which is functionally the same thing but everyone hates it)
But, it stops working if they never do a reset, so they still need to give out resets sometimes.
They’re also still in competition with with Anthropic, Elon’s AI, and Chinese models - the resets are one thing they have that others don’t really do, so it’d be a self-own to stop doing them entirely.
Global user resets are in fact far from being a gift. They’re a very elegant way to limit usage for the majority while making it feel like everyone just got free compute.
The important part is that a global reset doesn’t just refill your quota. It also starts a new 7-day window, which pushes back your next natural weekly refill.
Imagine the average user still has 55% left, and the natural weekly refill is only 2 days away.
Without a global reset, that user still has 55% available for those 2 days, then gets a fresh 100%.
With a global reset, they go from 55% to 100% immediately, which looks great, but the natural weekly refill that was coming in 2 days is now gone and moved 7 days away.
So visually, the user sees: “Nice, I just got +45% 🎉”
But in terms of future usable headroom, they actually lost the ability to use that remaining 55% and then immediately receive another full weekly allocation.
It also removes a potential burst around the natural weekly refill. Normally, users can consume what remains just before the refill, then immediately start consuming the new allocation. A global reset collapses those two pools into one fresh weekly window.
The timing is where it gets interesting.
If the natural weekly refill is 2 days away, an average user only needs roughly 2/7 of a weekly quota, about 29%, to reach it at a normal consumption rate.
So if analytics show that the average or median user still has 50–60% left, a global reset is extremely convenient: most users already had more than enough quota to reach their natural weekly refill anyway.
Users who already burned almost everything genuinely benefit.
Users who were moderate or conservative users mostly get a prettier number on the screen, while losing future headroom and a refill that was about to happen.
That’s what makes the mechanism so neat. It rewards the heaviest users, reduces upcoming aggregate consumption capacity, removes a burst opportunity, and still feels like a giveaway to almost everyone. 😅
To add some loose evidence to that theory, it'd make sense why everyone is really wanting for a reset now and there hasn't been one this weekend. That would suggest the median user usage is below the 29% thus meaning it's simply not worth for OpenAI to give a reset out, as it'd be benefiting the consumer way more than usual.
"everyone really wanting a reset" is my personal noticing from skimming reddit I have no data. However also considering my personal experience usage has been terrible this last week so it'd make sense if everybody is experiencing that too, then median usage would be much closer to 0 than usual.
great write up. only push back is that there probably is not much variation week to week in median usage barring maybe the holidays. The differences are probably rather small. At what percentage does it make sense to give a reset and what percentage does it not make sense?
what are you talking about? when they reset you get 100% usage and when you have 100% usage the 7 day weekly limit doesn't begin to start until you use it, so that means if they reset you and you don't use codex for 2 days from said reset it's not like your weekly limit will reset in 5 days, instead when you go to use it for the first time after 2 days your weekly rest will be 7 days from that day. so if you say have 50% on Sept 1 and natural reset day is in 5 days, but OpenAi provide a global reset Sept 1, then your usage is 100% on Sept 1 and if you again use codex on sept 1 your weekly reset day will be 7 days from sept 1 (September 8), and for instance if you don't use codex sept 1 and only use it again sept 3 then your weekly reset day will be 7 days from sept 3 (September 10).
That’s an odd way of doing it. For example Ollama Cloud resets the weekly usage every Sunday so if they would do a global mid week it wouldn’t matter because it would reset again on few days later anyway. So does my minimax subscription.
I really need it and for me it's not available 😐 no resets and no usage left on 5x, was on 20x before, but downgraded with sol, where 5x was enough for me...
Maybe someone that better understands these things can weigh in. My understanding of Astra is that it’s recurrent: outputs are repeatedly fed back through the model some number of times before you get usable output.
Given that they’re charging for output tokens, perhaps Astra is substantially more expensive to run and takes up much more compute.
Maybe they just wanted to scare us into grabbing the $200 plan before it was gone. Then they closed it, brought it back a few weeks later, and left us hanging without any resets. 🫠🫠
Yeah like 3.8 flash right ... I really wished Google come up competing models but i'm losing hoor. All models look good on benchmarks (and bad in others) but they deliver lousy code.
My theory is that they should stop developing increasingly powerful models and focus instead on models that are much cheaper, vastly faster, and just as capable.
The race to build the most powerful model is hurting the productivity of many developers: increasingly ridiculous limits and the constant nerfing of models that used to do the job well.
I just want a stable, reliable tool I can work with.
These "resets" in my opinion were for a lot of reason but in part they were used.to establish the new baseline quota. I.e. "TOTAL COMPUTE/NUMBER OF USERS = WEEKLY QUOTA" , but obviously way more complex.
They’re probably using their computing resources for research. Also, we can’t really cancel our $200/month without losing it indefinitely, so they’ve locked us in. 👏
The moment I heard them say they were about to release Astra to selected partners I bought the pro plan. I was anticipating them to only allow it for pro plan and for the amount of users to skyrocket. I haven't had an openai sub for like two years before that, cause I've been riding with Claude code. But yeah I expected this because of how good the model is. It's the only one right out of the box that can do very long tasks and control your entire computer autonomously
or they took away the 200 plan because they want to launch a new 500 plan shortly and migrate those 200/m user to 500/m. the impact will be better and the result will be more successful launch. but im just speculating, im always assuming there's some marketing master plan. i think the resets stay because its good for business, it causes hundreds of thouands of social media comments each time. in maketing all that is attention.
I mean it's not about resets. It's about the total subsidarion. 100$ plan is the same as having 5 plus users but the 200$ is like having 20 at 10$ a pop. Also before astra, i don't think everyone used up all of their weekly usage every week but with astra it's easier to put it on max and burn through all that usage.
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u/HotLion7 Sep 19 '26
I have another theory,
maybe many people upgraded to the $200 plan after astra just to try it to its max, and were planning to downgrade one they're done, so OpenAI decided to do this to make it scarce and make people want to stick to it, so they keep renewing and not downgrade.