# OpenAI Gave Me Six Months of ChatGPT Pro for Maintaining Open Source

- Date: 2026-09-19
- Author: ByF
- URL: https://blog.baifan.site/en/codex-for-open-source/
- Description: Applied to OpenAI's Codex for Open Source on a whim and got in — six months of Pro for free. Noting it down: feels great.

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An email popped up in my inbox today: "You can just build things, enjoy 6 months on us."

Sender: the Codex team at OpenAI. The first line, in big letters: "You're in." Then: "Thanks for maintaining open source projects."

I stared at that line three times and couldn't help laughing out loud.

{{< image src="/pictures/posts/codex-open-source-email.png" caption="Free ride: secured" width="800" class="center" >}}

A while back I filled out their Codex for Open Source application on a whim. Didn't expect much — I just listed the PRs I'd submitted to context-mode, plus my own byf and dev-skills.

Quick math: ChatGPT Pro is $200 a month, so half a year is $1,200. Honestly, saving that money feels great, but what made me happiest was actually this line from the email: "reviewing changes, maintaining releases, keeping quality high."

The most annoying part of open source was never the coding — it's reading a stranger's badly formatted PR in the middle of the night, debugging issues you can't reproduce, and re-testing piles of fiddly edge cases before every release. None of that turns into a slick demo video, and none of it is worth flexing on Twitter. The best treatment you normally get is an emoji reaction on an issue, or a flat "thx."

And today, someone said "thank you for maintaining open source" formally, in writing, and threw in six months of Pro on top.

It's a noreply address, so I can't write back — but the mood is genuinely great. Codex gets to run hard for the next six months. Now, back to fixing issues.