Effective November 2, 2026, xAI retired the grok-imagine-image-quality slug: requests now resolve silently to grok-imagine-image-2.0 at low quality, $0.01 per image cheaper at every resolution — $0.05 to $0.04 at 1K, $0.06 to $0.05 at 1.5K, $0.07 to $0.06 at 2K. Nothing errors, so the only way to know is the model field in your responses. Restoring the old quality on medium costs a cent more than you were paying.
Starting in December, Plus, Pro, and Business plans draw from one token-based allowance shared across ChatGPT and Codex. Instant chat is exempt; at the limit you wait, upgrade, or buy credits. OpenAI has published no per-plan token figure and no exact start date — so the size of the pool, and whether it is bigger or smaller than the two limits it replaces, is unknowable until it lands.
From November 1, DeepSeek bills its Search and Fetch agent tools at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Calls made through Claude Code, Codex, and DeepSeek's own harness were free until now. The unit is the request, not the result — so a search-heavy agent gains a new monthly line item that has nothing to do with tokens.
On October 30, Anthropic renamed Max 5x to Max and Max 20x to Ultra, with prices unchanged at $100 and $200 a month. Verified Ultra accounts lose the rolling 5-hour limit; the weekly cap does not move. The old '20x' described the 5-hour window, not the week — so this is pacing freedom, not a volume change.
