Burned 1.7 billion tokens in 30 days on a $20 Plus plan — someone please tell me this isn't normal
A user on a $20 Plus plan reported burning 1.7 billion tokens in 30 days, primarily through agent runs using Codex. The user noted that long-horizon agent tasks on Extra High, particularly a 2h44m session, consumed significantly more tokens than regular chat. They questioned whether this high token usage was typical, citing specific agents like u/ponytail (71 runs), u/browser (24), and $playwright-cli (23) for browser automation and scraping.
- Published
- Sep 7, 2026, 12:20
- Source type
- Dev community
- Tier
- Community
- Source status
- Healthy
Times shown in UTC
More details
Started using Codex about a month ago. Checked my stats page today and genuinely had to look twice.
The funniest stat is the streak — longest 7 days, current 0. So this wasn't a steady grind, it was a few weeks of total possession followed by touching grass.
Most of it went into agent runs: u/ponytail (71 runs), u/browser (24), and $playwright-cli (23) for browser automation and scraping work. Long-horizon agent tasks on Extra High eat tokens in a way normal chat just doesn't — one 2h44m session did more damage than a week of regular use.
So what's your lifetime number? Genuinely curious where 1.7B sits. Am I a heavy user, or is this a Tuesday for most of you?