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.
