Astra and Sol give similar value per quota, but Astra drains it twice as fast, test finds
Running repeated Codex CLI tasks on 8 open-source repos, a test found both models give about $13–15 per 1% of weekly quota, but Astra's speed and higher price drain quota about twice as fast.
many people reported astra draining quota way too fast i ran an empirical study to quantify this for us. now here's some hard data - 1. in terms of "how many $ of tokens do you get from 1% of weekly quota", astra and sol aren't meaningfully different, so OpenAI is not "cheating" or anything they both give around $13-15 per 1% of weekly quota on the $200 plan (btw this also shows you the month value of the subscription is ~$6000) 2. however, astra works much faster than sol while being way more expensive in terms of pricing. these two factors compound into a 2x faster drain on your quota the study was done by running codex cli on the same repeated tasks in 8 open source repos, and measured all the stats. both models ran at medium reasoning so my recommendation: don't use astra as the default for everything - it will cost you. use it only when you do need the extra intelligence, or you want something done fast