Running Codex on your chat quota: a 17-year-old developer's 'save quota' tool, 15k stars in three months

Since OpenAI folded Codex into ChatGPT, coding quota and chat quota are metered separately: the Codex allowance runs short while the chat allowance goes unused. A European developer who calls himself 17 years old built a bridge that turns the web ChatGPT into a model inside Codex, and the repo hit 15,527 stars in 103 days. But OpenAI has already announced that the two quotas merge in December, so this gap is about to close.

One Reddit post, one unused quota

On Jul 27, 2026, vechen (miuuyy on GitHub, @miu21590 on X) posted on r/codex: "I made Codex run on my existing ChatGPT quota [opensource]". The search results show the post with 139 upvotes and 148 comments. He had created the repo the day before.

Four days later he posted a second thread: 'I made ChatGPT Web (including Pro) a native model in Codex. Now on Windows, macOS and Linux'. The v30 release notes from Jul 1.0.0 say installation dropped from 15 minutes to 2 minutes, and thank everyone for 'so many stars'.

What it is

A desktop launcher plus a local bridge. Install it, log into ChatGPT in the built-in browser, restart Codex once, and the model list gains several entries ending in '(Web)', including GPT-6 Sol and GPT-5.6 Sol at each reasoning level, plus Pro if your account has it.

Once selected, Codex still manages tasks, context, subagents, and approvals. Only each model call gets routed to your logged-in ChatGPT web session. When it needs to read files or run commands, it goes back to the local Codex over MCP. It uses web chat quota and leaves Codex quota alone. The installer bundles its own browser and runtime, so you don't need to install Chrome or Node separately. MIT licensed, free.

Why this summer

The demand was created by OpenAI's billing structure. In Jul 9, Codex merged into the ChatGPT desktop app, but 'chat' and 'Codex' are still tracked as two separate ledgers. Heavy coders hit the Codex cap every week, while the Pro model on the web went largely unused. When GPT-6 Astra launched on Sep 3, it was stronger but burned through Codex quota faster, and the gap got much bigger.

The star curve follows these events:

(08-02 and 09-29 come from web archives; from October on it's GitHub daily snapshots; single-day figures come from Trendshift; the two 'close to' / 'over' figures are the author's own numbers in Discussions)

From Sep 4 to day 29 it gained about 8,500 stars, the main burst. Downloads tell it more clearly: the attachments across 66 releases were downloaded about 296k times on GitHub (including duplicate downloads from auto-update, 11-06), and the author says the launcher alone had 100k+ downloads.

Where the stars came from

No big accounts pushed it, and it never made Hacker News. The 'save quota' hook spread largely on its own.

The author replied under other people's posts. As of Aug 28, he wrote very plainly in Discussion #188: 'almost all of its visibility on X came from my replies under other people's posts', and said posts about the project itself were 'almost nonexistent'. Every day people complained about Codex quota on X, so he dropped the link under them.

He asked users to make videos for it. The same Discussion is titled 'Urgent: help keep ChatGPT Web → Codex workflows from being treated as abuse'. Around then, a new project was promoting itself on X with lines like 'infinite Codex' and 'keep it lowkey', tagging OpenAI staff. Chinese-language accounts were also passing off manual context-pasting as an unlimited-quota trick. He worried this path would be labeled abuse, so he asked users to post short videos or screenshots of their normal use and tag the repo. It was both a vote-gathering push and a way to give the project a respectable framing.

Japanese, Chinese accounts and tutorial sites passed it along. In Aug 30 and Sep 1, the Japanese account 'Codex研究ラボ' promoted it twice with copy like 'ChatGPT subscribers, must-see‼️ You can actually use Codex almost without limits'. On Sep 14, UPGPTs published a full tutorial, 'Codex Out of Quota? Connect ChatGPT Web to Codex'. From Sep 16 to 19, Zhihu, Medium and long Chinese-language X posts kept covering 'using web quota as Codex', overlapping the star peak. But Zhihu and the long Chinese posts mainly promoted another project, WebCodex, and only mentioned this one in passing. I couldn't find which specific post drove the Sep 17 peak.

After October it ran on aggregators. Trendshift (best rank across the site, #8), various GitHub recommendation sites, auto-generated 'GitHub trending' short videos, a Vietnamese Facebook group and Gitee mirrors. By then it was running on residual momentum.

Why it stood out from the pack

There are dozens of projects that let web ChatGPT do Codex's work. They fall into roughly three approaches:

(stars are from GitHub, October to early November)

It wins on three points:

Users don't have to switch places. Other approaches make you work inside ChatGPT, or shuttle context between two windows. This one just adds a few entries to Codex's model list and leaves everything else unchanged. The other projects on the same route have only dozens of stars each.

It installs like consumer software. Three-platform installers, a bundled runtime, a one-line install or repair command, self-checks, docs in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, and demo GIFs. By day three it had installation down to two minutes.

They even built account-ban risk into the product. Temporary chats are on by default, and each round opens a new session. Sep 3 added a "Zero Risk" mode that never touches the web page: the user pastes and sends the messages themselves. They also say outright that they won't do multi-account rotation. People in the Discussion thread have posted screenshots of locked accounts, and these design choices respond to that. On top of that, 66 releases in three months, and they patch it whenever the ChatGPT web app changes.

But the demand itself was handed to it by OpenAI's billing structure. It didn't create it.

The seam is about to close

OpenAI's help center stated in early November that from December, Plus, Pro, and Business quotas will be shared between ChatGPT and Codex, metered by tokens, with only Instant chats excluded. The OpenAI community forum thread 'Please Keep ChatGPT and Codex Usage Limits Separate' already has over a hundred and fifty replies, and the reaction on r/codex was 'then why am I still here'.

The author's pinned post on X reads: 'One month left to use your ChatGPT quota inside Codex before the limits merge'. The current docs have also softened, saying 'subject to that account's limits'. After the merge, the 'doesn't use Codex quota' selling point is gone. What's left is 'use the web Pro model inside Codex', and how much that's worth is unclear.

If it were you

D: Good to know, but I wouldn't build on it. It's a case of a platform billing loophole plus strong execution. The loophole closes in December, and this niche already has dozens of projects, so this spot is taken. Building another one now, the best case is catching the last few weeks.

Who it's for: developers who want to learn how to make an open-source tool spread like a product. Its packaging, risk notes and cold-start tactics are directly reusable.

Who it's not for: anyone thinking of building another "web quota into Codex" tool; or anyone trying the same arbitrage with Claude web plus Claude Code, since on that side the subscription quota is already shared (inferred, verify yourself), so there's no gap to exploit.

How to do it: borrow the playbook, not the topic. ① Watch platform billing changes and product merge announcements for gaps like "one subscription, two ledgers" or "works in the web app but not the CLI"; ② ship it as an option inside the tool users already have, not as a new interface to install, the smaller the change, the easier it spreads; ③ ship installers for all three platforms in the first week and cut install time to two minutes; ④ for gray-area usage, offer a "safest mode" up front and put the risks and what you won't do at the top of the README.

How to get users: follow its cold-start order: first post a "I made…" self-promo in the most relevant subreddit; then reply with the link under posts on X complaining about this pain point every day; once you have a few hundred stars, ask users to post videos of their own usage; Japanese and Chinese AI accounts and tutorial sites will pick it up on their own, provided your hook fits in one sentence, like "Codex, almost unlimited".

When to build before: for this topic, the quota merge in December ends it. The playbook itself isn't affected, but each gap usually has a window of only a few months, so you need a first version out within a week or two before the platform patches it (inferred).

What would mean you're reading it wrong: ① after the December merge, web-model usage clearly drains less quota than Codex and its stars keep rising steadily, meaning the gap isn't closed and there's room to follow; ② OpenAI delays or cancels the merge, reopening the window; ③ after the merge it keeps a group of users by "using Pro models inside Codex" and keeps growing, meaning it's more than an arbitrage tool, and "plugging web-exclusive models into a CLI tool" has demand in itself.