High token consumption with codex and 5.5
OpenAI Developer Community
May 22, 2026
@Marius91 The issue isn’t the tokens — it’s the plan itself. People on the forum basically explained to me that the lower-tier plan is only enough to “warm up” Codex, not to seriously work with code.As I said before, I want a clear explanation of how tokens are spent. But apparently, that is also considered my problem: I’m supposed to dig through system files myself to understand why the tokens disappeared so quickly and why I hit the limit.And if everything depends so much on saving tokens, then Codex should also help users save them: optimize prompts, avoid unnecessary output, keep responses compact, and clearly show what consumes the limit. Because right now users are forced to economize on every request and every answer just to keep working.
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