ChatGPT Pro 500: $500 Plan, and the $200 Tier Halved

OpenAI now wants $500 a month for ChatGPT, and to make the new plan look sensible it cut the $200 Pro plan’s Codex and Work allowance in half. That is $6,000 a year for a chatbot subscription, launched at DevDay on 29 September by a company whose revenue run rate is reportedly closing in on $70 billion. Nobody at OpenAI appears to be struggling with the rent.

Anyone with a Netflix login knows this playbook by heart: get everyone hooked cheap, wait until they’ve built their working day around you, then start trimming what they get and adding a pricier tier on top. Netflix and Disney+ spent a decade perfecting it. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in November 2022, has got there in under four years.

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What OpenAI announced

The new plan is called Pro 500. It gives 25 times the usage of the $20 Plus plan and exclusive access to “Ultrafast”, a souped-up version of GPT-6 Astra that OpenAI says runs at up to 300 tokens per second in Codex, roughly eight times faster than standard. (A token is a chunk of a word; 300 a second outpaces your reading.)

Both Pro tiers also get a personal “Dot”, OpenAI’s always-on agent, and Dot conversations don’t count against your limits. Which is lovely, if you wanted an agent.

The less festive part: from 30 October, the $200 plan drops from 20 times Plus usage to 10 times in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and weekly GPT-6 Pro messages fall from 200 to 100, as The Next Web and Digital Trends both reported. Existing subscribers keep their old limits until 29 October, then get a one-off grant of 62,500 usage credits (worth $2,500) that expires on 31 December. Think of it as the fruit basket HR sends after your redundancy.

How we got here

OpenAI launched the original $200 Pro plan in December 2024. In April this year it added a $100 Pro tier with 5 times Plus usage, openly pitched at Anthropic’s $100 Claude option. At that point, $200 bought you 20 times Plus, so the top tier was the bargain: double the money of the $100 plan for four times the usage.

Then GPT-6 Astra arrived and demand went through the roof. OpenAI paused new $200 sign-ups on 9 September, calling it “the smallest step that kept access broad”, according to Kingy AI’s write-up of the change. The plan has now reopened, smaller.

Thibault Sottiaux, who runs Codex and ChatGPT Work, described the new $200 plan on X as offering “half the dollar in API spend” of the old one. His defence, in fairness, has some logic to it: the cheaper Sol and Luna models had their API prices halved on 22 September, so if you mostly use those, you get about the same number of tokens as before. If you use Astra, the flagship everyone actually signed up for, its price didn’t move, so your allowance really has halved.

The volume discount vanished overnight

OpenAI didn’t put this bit of maths on a slide, so allow me. Divide each plan’s price by how many “Plus-worths” of usage it gives you.

Plan	Price a month	Usage vs Plus	Cost per “Plus-worth”
Plus	$20	1x	$20
Pro 100	$100	5x	$20
Pro 200 (until 29 Oct)	$200	20x	$10
Pro 200 (from 30 Oct)	$200	10x	$20
Pro 500	$500	25x	$20

Every tier now costs exactly $20 per unit of usage. The only plan that ever rewarded heavy users for committing (the old $200 deal at $10 a unit) is the one that got cut. Pro 500 gives no discount at all over Plus; you’re paying for speed and a bigger bucket. Tidy. You can practically hear someone in finance working backwards from a number.

Two weeks ago they were fighting to be cheaper

This is the bit that makes it so brazen. On 22 September, Anthropic and OpenAI cut flagship API prices within an hour of each other. Simon Willison tracked it: Claude Opus 5.5 went from $5/$25 per million input and output tokens to $4/$20, and GPT-6 Sol came in at $2/$10, half what GPT-5.6 Sol cost. We covered that price war at the time.

So the price war is real for developers and businesses buying by the token, who can switch provider with a line of code. For the consumer and “prosumer” tier, where people have built habits, saved chats and whole workflows inside one app, prices are going up. Cheap where you can walk away, pricier where you’ve moved in. Every landlord in Dublin understands this instinctively.

Google, for what it’s worth, went the other way in May, cutting its top AI Ultra plan from $250 to $200 and adding a $100 tier. Anthropic’s Claude Max still tops out at $200 for 20 times its Pro usage.

Netflix and Disney+ wrote this script

Netflix’s Standard plan cost $9.99 in 2015. In March it went to $19.99, with Premium hitting $26.99 and even the ad tier rising to $8.99, CBS News reported. That was its second US rise in under two years, fresh off a password-sharing crackdown, while revenue jumped nearly 16% in 2025. What you got for that doubling was mostly more reality shows about attractive people in villas and a documentary about a man who did crimes.

Disney+ launched in 2019 at $6.99. On 21 October, ad-free Premium goes to $21.49, a $2.50 jump and the first time it has crossed $20. That is roughly triple the launch price, for a catalogue that has spent the intervening years producing Marvel series so forgettable the actors seem to forget them mid-scene.

The pattern is identical: subsidise the early years with investor cash, grow the user base, then lean on the users once leaving feels like a hassle. OpenAI has 1.2 billion weekly users and, per Bloomberg, citing Axios, an annualised revenue run rate that has grown more than 70% since July to almost $70 billion. It is also reportedly in talks to raise at least $30 billion more at a $1.4 trillion valuation, having raised $122 billion in March.

And CFO Sarah Friar told staff in August that OpenAI “will be a public company in 2027”, or sooner if “our business continues to inflect”, CNBC reported. Nothing makes revenue inflect before an IPO quite like squeezing more out of the customers who love you most. Still the oldest trick going.

Should you pay $500?

Almost certainly not. Pro 500 makes sense for a narrow group: developers or small agencies running Codex flat out all day, for whom eight-times-faster output converts directly into billable hours. If Ultrafast saves you two hours a week and you bill $100 an hour, the maths works. For everyone else, it’s a very expensive way to wait slightly less.

If you’re on the $200 plan:

Use your old limits and the $2,500 credit grant before they vanish (29 October and 31 December respectively).
Check what you actually use. If most of your work runs on Sol or Luna, the cut barely touches you. If you live on Astra, you’ve lost half.
Price the alternatives honestly. Claude Max 20x and Google’s top AI Ultra tier are both $200 a month, and Google’s $100 Ultra and Claude’s $100 Max give 5 times their base plans.
If you’re a developer, the API may now be cheaper than any subscription for bursty work, given GPT-6 Sol at $2/$10.

If you’re on Plus or free, none of this touches you yet. Netflix felt harmless in 2015, too.

What this means

ChatGPT’s top price is now $500 a month; the $200 plan gives half the Codex and Work usage from 30 October.
Every ChatGPT tier now costs the same $20 per unit of usage, so heavy users lost their bulk discount.
API prices are falling while consumer subscriptions rise, because switching is easy for one group and painful for the other.
With an IPO pencilled in for 2027, expect more of this, from OpenAI and probably its rivals too.

We test these plans so you don’t have to pay $6,000 to find out. If you’d like a straight answer on which AI tools earn their monthly fee, get the newsletter here. It’s free, and we won’t halve it next month.

Did you know: OpenAI valued itself at $852 billion in March and is now reportedly asking investors for $1.4 trillion, a jump of about $550 billion in six months. Nobody can quite agree on the number either.

OpenAI has discovered the Netflix business model