I am on a max subscription for Claude, and hate the fact that OpenAI have not figured out that $20 => $200 is a big jump. Good luck to them. In terms of model, just last night, Codex 5.2 solved a problem for me which other models were going round and round. Almost same instructions. That said, I still plan to be on $100 Claude (overall value across many tasks, ability to create docs, co-work), and may bump up OpenAI subscription to the next tier should they decide to introduce one. Not going to $200 even with 5.3, unless my company pays for it.

I'm coding about 6-9h per day with Codex CLI on the $20 Plus sub, occasionally switching to extra-high reasoning and feeding it massive contexts, all tools enabled, sometimes 2-3 terminal sessions running in parallel and I've never hit limits... I operate on small-ish codebases but even so I try to work in the most local scope possible with AGENTS.md at the sub-directory levels.

Are you really hitting limits, or are you turned off by the fact you think you will?

You should look into Kilo Pass by Kilo Code (https://kilo.ai/features/kilo-pass). It's basically a fixed subscription and your credits roll over each month, and you get free extra credits too which are used up first before paid credits. It's similar to paying for Cursor except the credits roll over which is why I'm contemplating moving to it, because I don't want to be locked into any one LLM provider the way Claude Code or Codex make you become.

I guess the jump is on purpose. You can buy Codex credits and also use codex via the API (manual switching required).

I use Codex in OpenCode through the API and find the experience quite enjoyable.