Dear Sam and everyone at OpenAI,

I want to say thank you.

This is not a polished product review, a carefully calculated business case, or a request for anything. It is simply an honest note from someone who found themselves at a genuinely difficult moment and was helped by a small act of generosity built into your product.

I use ChatGPT Plus and Codex because they have become important to my ability to keep moving: to think clearly, organise work, build, learn, and turn ideas into something real. Like many people, I am trying to do a great deal with limited money and limited room for error.

Recently, I realised I had almost exhausted my Codex usage allowance. I was down to 2%. I could not afford to upgrade, and I had not fully understood how quickly some of the more intensive tasks could use that allowance. I was facing the prospect of losing access at exactly the point where I most needed it.

Then I found the full usage reset.

That may sound like a minor product feature. To me, at that moment, it was not minor at all. It was breathing room. It meant I could continue working instead of having to stop at a crucial point. It was a reminder that behind usage limits, plans, and pricing, there are real people whose circumstances are often more precarious than they look from the outside.

I know OpenAI is a large company solving difficult problems at an extraordinary scale. I also know no product can be unlimited, and that the work these systems do has real costs. But features such as this matter because they acknowledge a simple truth: sometimes a little flexibility changes everything.

The tools you are building can be powerful in a very practical human sense. They can help someone write the message they were unable to start, understand something intimidating, make progress on a project, or keep going when momentum is the one thing they cannot afford to lose.

I hope the team continues to protect that human dimension: clear communication about usage, graceful ways to recover when someone misjudges their limits, and room for people who need the technology but cannot always pay for more of it.

In the days around this, I also finished and published my first book, The Hunting Party, using ChatGPT as a thinking and editorial partner. It is 50,398 words assembled from decades of accumulated writing and experience, and I genuinely do not think I could have brought it together in the way I did without these tools.

The Hunting Party: Why uncertainty is making Hunters important again

Today, a full reset was a lifesaver for me. Thank you for building it in.

With gratitude,

Chris