Hey, big spender – OpenAI has a new SKU just for you
The Register ● Covered by 2 sources
OpenAI added a pricier ChatGPT Business seat with higher limits. It costs up to $100 more a month, and the pitch is simple: pay up or hit the ceiling.
Based on reporting by The Register — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI is selling Business customers a new way to spend more money on ChatGPT. On Monday, the company introduced ChatGPT Business Premium seats, a higher-priced add-on for people who feel boxed in by the standard Business tier.
The pitch is more usage. Premium seats can be mixed with regular Business seats, and OpenAI says they get five times the usage of Standard seats. They also skip the five-hour-per-day cap on advanced features. The catch is obvious: the standard Business seat costs $25 a month if billed monthly, or $20 if billed annually. Premium rises to $125 a month, or $100 on annual billing.
OpenAI’s own limits page shows how quickly those caps can matter. For GPT 5.5 Instant, Business users are told usage is “virtually unlimited.” GPT 5.5 Thinking is capped at 3,000 requests per week, while GPT 5.5 Pro is limited to 15 requests per month. Premium seats get five times those limits. After that, even Premium users are pushed into ChatGPT credits, OpenAI’s pay-as-you-go system for advanced features.
There’s also a launch promotion, but it’s tightly fenced. Customers who join the Premium waitlist can get $100 in workspace service credits for each qualifying Premium seat added, up to five seats. Only the first 10,000 customers on the waitlist qualify. OpenAI says the tier exists because customers asked for higher limits for deeper work on Business, and it clearly expects some of them to pay up.
Still, the timing makes the move look brash. Frontier AI companies are already under pressure for raising prices, and open-weight Chinese models are getting better fast. If a business wants heavy usage, the obvious counterpitch is simple: buy hardware, run the model yourself, and stop renting every extra request.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the same old Silicon Valley trick: call it “premium,” then charge more for not being annoyed by your own limits. OpenAI may find buyers, but the bigger story is that expensive closed access is starting to look less like a moat and more like a tax on convenience. Open-weight models are making that tax harder to justify by the month.
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