OpenAI is quietly testing a button that lets some ChatGPT Plus subscribers pay $8 to instantly restore the weekly usage quotas they have already burned through.
Key Points:
- A black prompt offering a full reset for $8 has surfaced for some ChatGPT Plus users on the $20 monthly plan after their weekly allowance ran out.
- OpenAI never announced the option, and a spokesperson said the company is exploring ways for capped users to buy more usage.
- Redeeming a reset restores usage to 100% and moves the next weekly renewal to roughly seven days out.
OpenAI Tests Paid ChatGPT Resets
A Reddit user on the $20 monthly plan described the option in ChatGPT's forum on Monday, saying a black prompt appeared at login once the account's weekly allowance ran dry. Nobody is forced to take it. The company defines a full reset as renewing the applicable weekly quota and cancelling the waiting period, which normally runs about five hours.
Redeeming one snaps usage back to 100% and pushes the next weekly renewal out to roughly seven days from the moment it is claimed. OpenAI never announced the feature.
A spokesperson said the company is exploring ways for people who exhaust their caps to buy additional usage, describing the effort as part of a broader push to make its products more accessible and more functional.
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Why An $8 Codex Reset Matters
ChatGPT's Pro tiers run $100 and $200 a month, which works out to somewhere between $25 and $50 for a single week of access.
Against that, an $8 charge looks like a cheap way for a stuck subscriber to finish a job on deadline. Codex, ChatGPT Work and the related agent tools all draw from one shared usage pool, so a single reset reopens several products at once.
Buying credits was already possible inside Codex settings. Buying back time was not, and that distinction separates this test from the top-up options OpenAI has offered since it shifted Codex from per-message billing to token-based credits in April.
Sam Altman Flags Rising AI Costs
Sam Altman has called rising AI costs a huge issue for the companies buying the technology.
The test lands during a cost fight with Anthropic, which observers have framed as an emerging price war over token rates and subscription value. A leak on Aug. 7 pegged Plus resets between $5 and $8, though none of those figures carried independent confirmation at the time. The button now sits at the top of that range.
OpenAI has spent months reworking how Codex quotas refill. It introduced banked resets on Jun. 11, letting subscribers stash a refresh and spend it later, then ran a two-week referral promotion that lifted the ceiling to four saved resets.
Earlier this month the company wiped limits outright for every paid Codex and ChatGPT Work account, the latest in a run of goodwill refills that the $8 prompt would now put a price on.
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