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Best use cases

mintbot works out of the box. Agents bought with bundled credit start chatting on day one — the default mintbot proxy routes every turn through our pooled LLM credit and deducts the cost from the agent's balance. No API key, no subscription, no setup.

But that convenience has a price: the proxy bills retail per token, which makes it the most expensive way to run an agent long-term. If you already pay for a ChatGPT or Anthropic subscription, plugging it in through the bundled Codex or Claude Code CLI is by a wide margin the cheapest way to run a mintbot agent.

This page covers when to use which provider, why a ChatGPT Pro subscription is the most LLM you can buy for the dollar today, and how to wire it up in 60 seconds.

The four ways an agent talks to an LLM

A mintbot agent picks the active LLM provider from the LLM providers modal in the web panel. Four routes exist:

Route Who pays When to pick it
mintbot proxy (default) Mintbot meters per token; the credit balance on your agent goes down as it answers. Trying it out. Short tasks. No subscription to plug in.
Claude Code OAuth Your Anthropic Pro / Max subscription. Unmetered within Anthropic's per-account quotas. You already pay Anthropic. Long tasks heavy on Claude.
OpenAI Codex OAuth Your ChatGPT Plus / Pro / Team / Business subscription. Unmetered within OpenAI's per-account quotas. You already pay OpenAI. Most cost-efficient for big workloads.
Bring your own API key (BYOK) Your own paid API account at any provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, …). Metered, you pay the API price. You want a specific model that mintbot doesn't ship in the default catalog.

The mintbot proxy is convenient but it's the most expensive option per token: you pay mintbot's retail price on each call. If you're going to use the agent for any real work — drafting, coding, research — wire in your own subscription on day one.

Why ChatGPT Pro is the price-per-LLM winner

For ~$200 / month a ChatGPT Pro subscription gives you:

  • Extended access to OpenAI's flagship models (currently GPT-5)
  • Codex CLI access with generous quotas
  • Tools, web search, file uploads — same as the chat product

Compared to spending the same $200 on raw API tokens, Pro buys you dramatically more model usage. The exact ratio depends on what model you're hitting, but for everyday coding / drafting tasks the break-even is usually well under 10 days of normal use. After that, every additional call is free at the margin.

ChatGPT Plus ($20 / mo) works too — same wiring, smaller quotas. Codex CLI on Plus is enough to power a single agent doing light / medium work. If you're running the agent all day, every day, Pro is worth the upgrade.

Higher tiers work the same way

ChatGPT Team and Business (the paid org plans) also expose Codex with their own quotas. The login flow described below is identical — the panel doesn't care which tier you signed up for, as long as the OAuth grant includes Codex access.

The same logic applies to Anthropic Pro / Max: if you already pay Anthropic, sign in to Claude Code instead and use that. The Codex route is a recommendation for cost, not a religious preference — pick whichever subscription you already hold.

Wire up Codex in 60 seconds

  1. Open your agent's web panel (from the Telegram bot's 🌐 Open agent web panel menu).

  2. In the top bar, click LLM providers & credit.

    Agent panel top bar with the “LLM providers & credit” pill highlighted
    Click the LLM providers & credit pill in the top bar.

  3. Click Connect ChatGPT account.

  4. The panel pops a URL. Open it in another tab, sign in to your ChatGPT account, confirm the device grant.
  5. The panel detects the completion, shows Codex as logged in (for example, your Plus / Pro / Team / Business account), and selects it as the active provider automatically.

That's it. The next message you send the agent goes through your ChatGPT subscription's quota.

What happens under the hood

The bundled codex login --device-auth flow lands an OAuth token in ~/.codex/auth.json on the agent VPS. Hermes (the runtime) talks directly to chatgpt.com using that token. There is no proxy in the middle; mintbot never sees your prompts or your OpenAI account state.

When to keep using mintbot proxy

In some cases it still makes sense to use mintbot credit:

  • Trial / demo — no subscription, just kick the tires.
  • Managed fallback — when a connected subscription or BYOK account is out of quota, paused, or temporarily broken, you can switch back to mintbot credit and keep working without touching third-party accounts.

For your own personal driver agent — the one you DM from Telegram all day for whatever work comes up — the Codex (or Claude Code) route is the right answer.

Quick-start cheat sheet

1. Buy ChatGPT Pro at https://chatgpt.com/pricing  ($200/mo)
2. Open your agent's panel  (Telegram bot → 🌐 Open agent web panel)
3. LLM providers & credit → Connect ChatGPT account
4. Complete the OAuth flow in the browser tab
5. Send the agent a message — it now answers through your ChatGPT Pro quota