I'm happy to pay the same right now for less (on the max plan, or whatever) -- because I'm never running into limits, and I'm running these models near all day every day (as a single user working on my own personal projects).

I consistently run into limits with CC (Opus 4.5) -- but even though Codex seems to be spending significantly more tokens, it just seems like the quota limit is much higher?

> they can't pass that extra cost on to customers

I don't understand why not. People pay for quality all the time, and often they're begging to pay for quality, it's just not an option. Of course, it depends on how much more quality is being offered, but it sounds like a significant amount here.

I wonder how much their revenue really ends up contributes towards covering their costs.

In my mind, they're hardly making any money compared to how much they're spending, and are relying on future modeling and efficiency gains to be able to reduce their costs but are pursuing user growth and engagement almost fully -- the more queries they get, the more data they get, the bigger a data moat they can build.

The "quality" model can cost $200/month. They'll be fine.