OpenAI Codex Costs Exceed $1.3M in 30 Days, Powering OpenClaw Open-Source Project's Automated Development

Peter Steinberger, OpenAI employee and founder of the OpenClaw open-source project, recently shared his API usage data. In 30 days, Codex calls cost over $1.305 million, covering 7.6 million requests and 603 billion tokens, generated by 100 Codex instances with costs borne by OpenAI.

These Codex agents can autonomously review code, detect vulnerabilities, handle GitHub tickets, and even join meetings to generate development requests. The fast mode is the main reason for high costs; turning it off reduces costs to about $300,000.

Currently, Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor are competing for developer users. OpenAI has switched to token-based billing, increasing expenditure volatility for heavy users. Steinberger says this is an experiment to explore software development changes without cost limits.