# ChatGPT Plus

- Canonical page: https://fze-fze.me/gear/chatgpt-plus/

Most cost-effective AI subscription plan.

![It's an everything app!](ChatGPT.png)

ChatGPT is an epoch-making product that ushered in a new era in which people turn to LLMs for all kinds of questions. I first heard the name back in 2022, when I had no idea what AI even meant, and like most people in mainland China, I didn't take it seriously. The turning point came in 2025: DeepSeek rose to fame overnight, and suddenly everyone was talking about AI, the future of humanity, AIGC... I started paying closer attention to the development of large language models. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Qwen — I tried them one by one to find the smartest one. In the end I settled on ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, still the most popular AI product in the world (and the one that has consistently had the frontier models).

Back then OpenAI only had ChatGPT — no Codex yet. But it still saved me a huge amount of time. I gradually dropped search engines like Google, because ChatGPT could search, verify, and turn raw information into a clean answer. Even knowing it sometimes gets things wrong, I trusted it anyway and let it become my teacher.

Since I major in Computer Science, I code a lot too. Before Codex existed, whenever I wanted to code I had to write a prompt, wait a while, and paste the answer into an editor like VSCode. Its coding ability wasn't great back then — but for me, it was good enough.

On February 26, 2026, I noticed OpenAI had released a new product — Codex Desktop. I've always believed TUIs are just a transitional format (even though Claude Code is great) and GUI is where things are ultimately headed. History keeps proving this, and Codex is proving it again. Its interface has become the industry benchmark to this day — Cursor, Zcode, Antigravity all ended up looking similar. I installed it and quickly discovered how addictive vibe coding is.

![My codex usage profile.](codex-profile.png)

Some surveys suggest vibe coding continuously stimulates the brain and keeps you in an excited state of positive feedback — just like playing a video game. That's exactly right. I can sit in front of my laptop all day, waiting on a session to finish and building out a website. What's more, Codex's token plan comes with a weekly cap and a 5-hour cap, which means you actually have to plan your usage to squeeze the most out of it. (Tibo also leveraged the usage-reset mechanic to hype up the whole scene, which only made Codex's reputation grow even bigger — and, well, it worked.)

Despite some drawbacks in the underlying model itself — its front-end/UI design ability, for instance — ChatGPT Plus remains the most cost-effective AI subscription out there. On average, $20 buys you roughly the same amount of tokens as $600 would through the API (assuming you actually use them all). You also get access to the most capable image model (GPT-Image 2) and voice model (GPT-Live). And once you hit your usage limit, you can still keep talking to ChatGPT — it seems to have no hard cap on quantity. All in all, using ChatGPT feels reassuring: you don't have to worry about getting banned or flagged for no reason.

OpenAI is consistently in the first tier, and in my opinion, they might just be the company that ends up building AGI.