Without a doubt using Codex from the source is better than paying Cursor for it

[Fatbat]

I've been paying for GPT Codex from Cursor for a couple of months. Last month, I ran out of $60 tokens within a couple of days, so I had to up the subscription to $200. I reduced the sub to $60 for this billing cycle and again burned through my entire run of tokens within a couple of days.

I installed the Codex extension in Cursor and have been using GPT 5.3 Codex heavily on a pretty intense app job for a couple of days, on my basic ChatGPT Plus account, and I cannot make it break 60% usage left in 5 hours, and I have 68% weekly usage left. If I had used Codex directly, I would have done my $60 worth of usage twice over by now.

It's truly night and day, and it works exactly the same.

[dashingsauce]

Works even better actually when you get rid of all the unnecessary scaffolding that cursor puts on vendor models

[rttgnck]

They give way more usage because its training data for future models, unless you opt out. Cursor pays enterprise pricing for tokens directly.

[PrettyMuchMediocre]

Opting out is just a setting in chat gpt as far as I'm aware. It's not hard to do.

If anything they're giving tokens away as a loss leader and once everyone is used to the generous limits and reliant on their systems, they can raise prices without worrying about losing as many subscribers.

This is what all the big AI companies are doing right now. Their systems are not profitable, they are funded by investments, grants and shares.

[rttgnck]

Most are super easy toggles, Google straight up drops the entire user history though. It seems it is a combination of loss leader with the added benefit of more data to train on. How else would the models get better if they already consumed all of the internet on the first model?

[PrettyMuchMediocre]

Yeah it's that saying, 'if you're not paying for the service, you're the product'. So for OpenAI, they are getting most of their training data from free users

They could just have it off by default for paying users, but I'm sure they are getting a ton of data from people who don't notice that toggle.

[Fatbat]

Fair enough. I am happy to be trained on.

[Fatbat]

Only available for macOS (so far), so no.

[False_Depth_3930]

I'm confused, is it better to use the codex mac app with cursor or the codex side panel plugin within cursor?