What do you really get from paying OpenAI?

If you use Codex, or especially Claude Code, frequently you'll be spending a lot of time watching and monitoring your usage, so much so that you'll eventually spend some of it making a silly Tampermonkey script to help you keep on top of it.

One thing I've always wondered is what exactly are you getting when you pay money to OpenAI. Because this page doesn't show all of it. What there really is, apparently, is a hidden meter, or meters, that are completely inaccessible to users.

I don't want to be a "posts his conversations with AI" guy, so I'll truncate it to the relevant part below.

This is as close as you can get to pinning them down to admitting that paying customers are getting limited, bucketed usage, and they're not telling you the numbers. This is Gmail launching in 2004 with "You get a free email account with... storage!"

I can't be too critical though, because on the Anthropic side it's actively worse: using Claude on the web uses your main usage meter directly, the same one you use for Claude Code. I guess that's one way to solve your capacity issues. They don't tell you that, either.