I have a 20x sub and it feels like the 20$ sub eight months ago. I can easily burn it in an afternoon, and I don't have many projects.
According to API usage, they cut you off at around the equivalent of 900$ of API usage, whatever that means. It's very difficult to track all this, and very subjective. What validates me is that of all my friends I am not the only one.
I can only imagine the 100$ users must be feeling the rug being pulled even harder.
Anyway, this has led me to get a Spark, and a second is on the way.
For me Sol is less efficient than Astra - Sol makes many avoidable mistakes and has issues with context compaction - sometimes it goes haywire after a couple compactions.
Agreed on the “being dumbed down” observation. It appears they’re most powerful at release time and then are gradually “optimized” so every new model feels more powerful. But there’s no evidence on routing to a deployment with other weights. It would be plausible to do so though at least at peak times.
What really is fun is when the opposite of the public outcry about purported distillation happens - when Astra in Codex suddenly responds in Chinese. Now that is fun. Wonder what it’s routing to.
Weird. That's definitely not my experience. On the $100 plan and I can burn my entire week's budget in a few hours easily with Astra. It's borderline unusable.
People often use a bunch of subagents, poor context management (though Codex's tight context limits and constant compaction tend to mitigate this), a bunch of projects at once, etc., as well as not using workflows that do heavy planning once up front and then consult it rather than thinking endlessly about what to do during the implementation part.
It's also the case that working on massive codebases is just a different beast. If they've been slopmining a monorepo for months with 200x, then their codebase is probably Lovecraftian at that point and requiring extensive effort to iterate on.
i am on just the $20 plan and I am using it literally almost all day, 2-3 different projects at the same time, and I am failing to run out! I am naturally always trying to be efficient, its a weird personality trait I have, where I don't try to but I willingly choose to use GPT-6-Luna most of the time now (well 5.6 before that) More Sol lately and for most tasks.. they seem to have the same output, its only super hard things where I kick it up to Astra.
I am so used to doing planning with the best models and switching to Luna, Deepseek 4.1 Flash (really, the cheapest model, and often much better results for lots of things) really people are limiting themselves when they only use one company's models. You really gain a TON by treating each one more like different people with diverse range of personalities, passions, skills, and knowledge.
Today, ChatGPT desktop app was tasked with making 7 variations of new versions of some existing websites of mine - and they all kinda looked the same. I did get lazy with it though.... I can solve that probably, with skills/changing the default frontend skills but also just sending the same task to Reasonix Code w/ deepseek, and some other models, gets some good wide range of outputs.
I strongly agree. Check out the Codex subreddit. Many empirical examples of Astra silently downgrading the models. One found Astra was silently using Luna Max (but still billing for Astra).
Even when I try to stick with Sol X/High, my limits are at best half of what they were before Astra launched, and the intelligence has declined markedly.
I cancelled my $100 plan. This is absolutely absurd and frankly unusable now.
it's per week. I don't use the mainstream harness, skills, agents.md, subagents, orchestration and mcp, so the the thing does what I ask instead of going into rabbit holes and doing coffee machine chatter with it's shaitan friends
Entirely depends on the work asked and the repo involved.
When I’m doing work on a repo where I’m implementing a standard and the agents have to read the standard to keep from hallucinating my usage skyrockets.
Hell this changes depending on which language I’m working with.
I've stopped using Astra entirely and remain on Sol orchestrating Luna Xhigh, but it's still not nearly a week's usage for a week's allotment.
And even then, whenever a new model is about to come out, it feels like the model I'm using is being dumbed down substantially.
I have no evidence for this and can have no evidence for this, but I can vote with my wallet regardless.