OpenAI halves $200 plan allowance, launches $500 plan
The New Stack Frederic Lardinois ● Covered by 2 sources
OpenAI launched a $500-a-month Pro plan and cut the $200 plan’s usage in half. People who bought the cheaper top tier just got less for the same money.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has a new top shelf now, and it’s expensive. The company introduced a $500-per-month Pro plan on Tuesday, pitched as the highest-usage option in its subscription lineup. It comes with 25x the usage allowance of ChatGPT Plus, plus access to an Ultrafast tier for GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI says can generate tokens at up to 8x the standard speed in Codex. Ultrafast for GPT-6.1 Sol is also on the way.
The bigger news for existing customers is the cut. Starting October 30, OpenAI will reduce the usage allowance on its $200 Pro plan for ChatGPT Work and Codex from 20x the Plus plan to 10x. GPT-6 Pro in Chat will also drop from 200 messages per week to 100. Current subscribers keep their existing limits through October 29, then get 62,500 usage credits — OpenAI says that’s worth $2,500 — expiring on December 31, 2026.
One thing is not changing: OpenAI says it will not bring back the 5-hour limit on the $200 plan. That means users can spend their weekly allowance at whatever pace they want. The company clearly thinks that’s a feature. Anyone who actually bought the plan may see it differently.
Tibo Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of product and platform, posted the change on X before the formal announcement, and the reaction from developers was predictably sour. His argument is that users will still get more work done than they did a month ago, even with less included usage, because the models are cheaper and more efficient. That may be true in OpenAI’s internal math. It is also not what many people thought they were buying.
There’s another wrinkle here: the $500 plan’s included allowance is still unclear. OpenAI says the new plan gives the highest included usage of its subscription plans, but hasn’t said exactly what that means in practice. For now, the company is also giving existing subscribers a one-time credit to help with the transition. Whether that softens the blow is another matter entirely. The old 20x benchmark was already common among frontier labs, including Google’s top Gemini AI Ultra plan and Anthropic’s top $200 tier, while $100 plans have generally sat at 5x. OpenAI just moved the goalposts and invited everyone else to notice.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the cleanest possible example of subscription bait-and-switch dressed up as efficiency. If a company wants to charge $500, fine — but cutting the $200 tier in half while acting generous is the sort of move that makes power users start shopping. Frontier labs love to call this “product strategy”; everyone else calls it reading the fine print and muttering.
Read more about this at: The New Stack
