New $200 Pro signups paused as Astra demand spikes

OpenAI on September 10 paused new purchases of its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription, after demand for GPT-6 Astra outran its capacity. OpenAI explained the move in a statement quoted in a Threads post: “These put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible.” It has given no timeline for lifting the pause.

Astra launched on September 3, a week before the pause. OpenAI’s help page, quoted by CIO, calls the product “the ChatGPT Pro $200 plan (Pro 20X)” and says new sign-ups and upgrades are paused temporarily. The pause covers upgrades from the Free, Go, Plus and $100 Pro tiers, along with promotions tied to the $200 plan. Existing $200 subscriptions keep working, but anyone who cancels or downgrades during the pause can’t get back onto the $200 tier until it ends. The $100 Pro tier is still on sale with lower usage limits.

Bhupendra Chopra, an analyst at Kanerika, said the $200 plan carries the heaviest Astra usage limits, and that the API, Business and Enterprise stayed open. On the OpenAI Platform, Astra is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output.

Thibault Sotiaux, known as Tibo, called demand for Astra “unprecedented” the day before the pause. He also warned that OpenAI “might have to pause new Pro subscriptions for a bit if this continues,” adding: “We’re pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand, but I’ve not seen anything like it until now and we went through very steep growth before.” OpenAI had raised usage limits for Codex users as recently as the month before, TechCrunch reports.

Much of the load comes from how Astra gets used. Its headline feature is computer use: the model operates a desktop the way a person would, filling out forms and moving through web pages at “superhuman speed,” Greg Brockman said, per Fortune. OpenAI has also said Astra can burn through usage allowances faster than GPT 5.6 Sol, its previous flagship model. Access was rationed from the start: Fortune reports that a handful of enterprise customers got Astra first so OpenAI had time to scale compute. After that it reached Pro and Business accounts before Plus. Sam Altman called the launch “messy” after some paying users couldn’t get the model right away, CIO reported. The sign-up pause looks like the same rationing, now aimed at the plan where each new subscriber can draw the most compute. Chopra counts rate limits, usage caps, queueing and sign-up pauses as forms of capacity gating that every frontier vendor uses.

OpenAI has done this before. In November 2023 it temporarily halted sign-ups for the $20-a-month Plus plan after a surge that followed its first developer conference, Fortune reported. “The surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience,” Altman wrote at the time.