Not entirely. The free account is remarkably capable in quality, but not quantity. The €$20 account would be quite reasonable if I were simply doing more with it right now.

Not for me, I feel I get quite a bit of value from the $20 Claude subscription.

Not yet for Codex, for Claude, the astroturf bots are selling it as pretty sweet in comparison over the past 3 months as OpenAI as floundered. If you want a laugh, go see http://old.reddit.com/r/codex subforum to see some basement dwellers screaming about the plus plans and codex offerings in general sucking - quite the entitled youtube commenters over there.

I use codex $20 right now and I only sip from it for homelab stuff and writing my slop bomb star trek fanfic series. I try to do 5.6 Luna Xhigh to stretch my usage.

I don't like the 5 hour limit where I end up 'wasting' usage (or saying to a long-running goal, /goal resume until its out of usage), I'd prefer to be able to toggle that off, but that's not possible right now.

I use Opencode Go with deepseek 4.1 flash 1017 for things I'm okay having the CCP (though I'm sure all state-sponsored actors are live watching all remote LLM resellers at this point) know about me, it gets a lot more tokens per dollar of mine as a result.

I plan to wait on codex long enough to see if the 'unified usage' of chatgpt plus chat and codex pieces actually pick up how much usage I get in codex, or if anthropic comes out with a good enough image generator model, and depending on what happens with those two questions, I will stay with codex another month or move over to claude for the same price point.

Either way, I'm not burning $500/month on get rich quick schemes (though I use premium plans and AIs daily at my day job) for my personal life because AI BUBBLE AGI ANY DAY NOW SKY IS FALLING, but I do keep one foot in the tub while the subsidy is around.

The Codex 20$ subscription is very much workable if you manage it well.