Now that there's a $100 ChatGPT Pro tier, it's a no brainer for any economist to choose ChatGPT over Claude at EVERY price point.
1. $100/mo now gets you access to Pro in the web UI, which is invaluable for academic work. See
x.com/aniketapanjwani/status… for how to optimally use Pro. No Anthropic model compares
2. $20/mo usage with Claude Code is a joke. $20/mo usage with Codex is limiting but not that far off of $100/mo Claude Code usage. I've myself experienced getting capped within an hour at $100/mo with Claude Code with normal usage. With $100/mo with Codex, for the typical economist's usage, you'll never hit 5 hour or weekly limits.
3. GPT 5.4 itself is a much better model than Opus 4.6 for almost everything economists would care about. CC has a better developed plugin ecosystem, subagents in CC work better IMO, and CC IMO is by default a better writer. For anything else - helping you understand papers, write code, plan out structural estimation, think through identification arguments, choose between estimators - I'd prefer Codex.
4. Whenever OpenAI has an outage, they reset usage for everyone, and they keep extending the length to which you get double usage from your subscription (now until end of May!). Anthropic is crunched heavily for compute and seems to be both explicitly (
x.com/trq212/status/20372546…) and perhaps surreptitiously (
x.com/om_patel5/status/20417…) trying to restrict their compute provision.
5. The Codex Desktop app is hands down the best interface for agentic coding right now. The Claude desktop app is probably the worst way to use Claude Code (go to /r/claudecode to read about all the bugs people encounter). There's a dearth of educational material about the Codex Desktop App though (which I will be solving soon)
I walk through each of these points in more detail in this YouTube video:
youtu.be/_oKPa8_7w3Y?si=1Bru…
So, what are the switching costs from Claude Code to Codex?
> The models feel different/act differently. You have to get used to it.
> Skills are an open format, so you can just copy all your skills over to ~/.agents/skills from ~/.claude/skills . There are some CC specific skill features which don't port over 1 to 1 to Codex.
> Subagents are configured differently and act differently in CC compared to Codex.
> Hooks are experimental in Codex and you have fewer options of harness actions onto which you can configure hooks.
I'd say if you haven't yet started with these tools, choose Codex for sure.
If you're hitting your Claude Code session limits regularly, then also switch to Codex for sure.
If you're not hitting your session limits, or you have a $200 budget, I'd recommend getting a $20/mo Codex sub and just try it out/feel it out.
Codex and CC pair well together anyway, for example by having one write a plan/code and having the other review the plan/code.
I have Codex at a $200/mo subscription and CC at a $100/mo subscription - that works well for me, I use Codex 80% of the time and CC 20% of the time.
We’re updating our ChatGPT Pro and Plus subscriptions to better support the growing use of Codex.
We’re introducing a new $100/month Pro tier. This new tier offers 5x more Codex usage than Plus and is best for longer, high-effort Codex sessions.
In ChatGPT, this new Pro tier still offers access to all Pro features, including the exclusive Pro model and unlimited access to Instant and Thinking models.
To celebrate the launch, we’re increasing Codex usage for a limited time through May 31st so that Pro $100 subscribers get up to 10x usage of ChatGPT Plus on Codex to build your most ambitious ideas.