Codex (gpt-5.5, Plus plan) — rate-limit cost per token jumped ~10-20x since June 16, draining the 5h budget in 2-3 prompts

2 min read Original article ↗

Summary

Starting ~June 16, my ChatGPT Plus Codex budget drains in 2–3 prompts on gpt-5.5, where the same model/plan/app previously gave 20+ prompts. My Codex session logs (token_count / rate_limits events) show the limit-% consumed per token has increased roughly 10–20×, with no change on my side — prompts are actually smaller now and reasoning tokens are near zero.

Environment

  • Codex desktop app, Windows 11
  • Model: gpt-5.5, service_tier = "default"
  • Plan: plus (confirmed in rate_limits.plan_type)
  • Config unchanged across the regression window

Evidence — same plan, same model, same app

June 12 (working — 20+ prompts/day):

Prompt Input tokens Reasoning tokens Primary limit %
06:08 22,334 488 2%
06:09 52,161 1,130 3%
06:51 57,112 3,645 9% → 11%
06:54 79,961 5,125 15% → 16%

→ ~57K-token prompt with 3.6K reasoning ≈ 1% of the 5h budget

June 18 (broken — 2–3 prompts):

Prompt Input tokens Reasoning tokens Primary limit %
07:22:27 18,910 152 18%
07:22:30 20,480 0 45%
07:22:34 23,469 48 57%
07:22:43 23,631 0 68%
07:22:50 23,839 0 77%

→ ~20K-token prompt with zero reasoning ≈ 10–27% of the 5h budget

Per-token limit cost changed ~10–20×. Smaller prompts, near-zero reasoning, yet each consumes 10–20× more of the 5-hour budget than a 57K-token xhigh prompt did on June 12.

What I ruled out (verified from logs)

  • Not reasoning effort: reasoning tokens are 0–152 today vs 3,645–5,125 on the good days.
  • Not prompt/context bloat: input tokens dropped from 57K–80K to 18K–23K.
  • Not my config: model_reasoning_effort was already high/xhigh on the working days (June 12–15). xhigh gave 30–40+ prompts on June 3, 12, 13, 15.
  • Not the weekly cap: secondary window is only at 12%. The 5-hour window is the one draining.

Corroborating timing

OpenAI status page shows an active incident ongoing ~2 days (since ~June 16), which matches exactly when my usable prompt count dropped from ~9 sessions/day to ~4.

Ask

Was the Plus-tier gpt-5.5 rate-limit budget reduced or the per-token weighting changed around June 16? If intentional, what's the new budget? If not, can it be investigated?

Session log references

  • Good day: rollout-2026-06-12T09-07-36-019eba71-5c57-70d0-a8fa-aa999731e9ff.jsonl
  • Bad day: rollout-2026-06-18T10-22-14-019ed99b-ea9d-7fa1-a86b-dca4e55a8e3e.jsonl
  • Rate-limit data is in token_count events with rate_limits payload (fields: primary.used_percent, secondary.used_percent, plan_type, resets_at).