What you pay for Codex CLI depends on whether you’re running it against a ChatGPT subscription’s shared usage pool or against an API key billed by the token, and OpenAI keeps both paths open at once.
The subscription side stacks four tiers. Free costs nothing and lets you poke at Codex on quick local tasks, no cloud runs included. Go is $8/mo for lightweight work. Plus is $20/mo and is where most individual developers land: it includes Codex across the web, CLI, IDE extension, and iOS, plus cloud features like automatic GitHub code review and Slack integration, and it runs on the GPT-5.6 model family — Sol for depth, Terra as the everyday default, Luna for speed on high-volume work. Plus gives you roughly 15-90 local messages per 5-hour window on Sol, scaling up on the cheaper Terra and Luna variants. Pro starts at $100/mo and buys 5x or 20x Plus’s rate limits depending on which Pro tier you pick, plus research-preview access to GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a low-latency model OpenAI hasn’t opened to the API yet. None of these tiers publish a hard message count — usage is metered in credits that vary by model, context size, and how much tool-calling and retrieval a task triggers, so a five-line fix and a multi-file refactor can burn very different amounts of the same allowance.
If subscription math doesn’t fit your workflow — CI runners, shared environments, or anyone who wants predictable per-task cost instead of a monthly ceiling — Codex CLI also runs against a bare API key. That skips the ChatGPT app entirely: no cloud tasks, no GitHub review, no Slack integration, just the CLI, SDK, or IDE extension billed at standard token rates. For gpt-5.3-codex, OpenAI’s coding-specialized model, that’s $1.75 per million input tokens, $0.175 per million cached input tokens, and $14 per million output tokens, confirmed directly on platform.openai.com’s pricing page. Batch API calls (async, non-interactive) run at exactly double those rates — $3.50/$0.35/$28 per Mtok — in exchange for OpenAI processing them on a relaxed schedule. The output-token price is the number to watch: at $14/Mtok, a handful of long, code-heavy generations adds up fast compared to the input side.
Team and org pricing splits by seat rather than usage tier. Business is $20 per user per month billed annually (with a 2-seat minimum) or $25/user/mo billed monthly, and adds larger cloud VMs for faster task execution, SAML SSO, MFA, and a default no-training policy on your business data. Enterprise and Edu drop the fixed price for a sales conversation and layer on priority request processing, SCIM and EKM provisioning, domain verification, role-based access control, a compliance API with audit logs, and data residency controls — the checklist procurement teams ask for once Codex moves from a few developers experimenting to an org-wide rollout.
One structural detail worth knowing if you’re comparing Codex to Claude Code: OpenAI counts local CLI messages and cloud tasks against the same rolling 5-hour window, so running heavy cloud-based PR generation and interactive CLI sessions in the same afternoon draws from one shared pool, not two separate ones. Anthropic’s Claude Code, by contrast, sells usage as a flat multiple of Pro (5x on Max 5x, 20x on Max 20x) without splitting local versus cloud consumption the same way. If you’re deciding where Codex fits, that shared-pool design means heavy cloud automation (scheduled tasks, GitHub delegation) eats into the same budget as your interactive terminal sessions — plan Pro versus Plus accordingly rather than assuming cloud runs are “free” on top of local usage.
For most individual developers doing focused coding sessions a few times a week, Plus at $20/mo is the sensible starting point — it’s the tier OpenAI itself frames that way, and it includes the full surface area (CLI, IDE, cloud review) rather than Go’s stripped-down local-only access. Daily, heavy agentic users should expect to outgrow Plus’s rate limits and move to Pro, where the 5x-vs-20x choice comes down to how much of your day Codex actually runs rather than how much you’re willing to spend. And if you’re automating Codex inside CI or a shared service account where predictable per-token cost matters more than a flat monthly fee, the API key path — especially at gpt-5.3-codex’s $1.75/$14 rate card — is the more transparent option to budget against.