OpenAI’s $200 Pro plan comes back worth half the API spend

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro $200 plan reopens to new subscribers on September 30. The price is still $200, but OpenAI is changing how usage is counted, and under the new method the plan comes back with half the allowance it had before. “If you do the math, it will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan,” Thibault Sottiaux wrote on Twitter on September 29.

New sign-ups and upgrades for the tier have been frozen since September 10, per CIO. OpenAI calls the tier Pro 20X because it gives 20 times the usage of Plus. Existing subscribers kept their plans during the pause, and the $100 Pro tier stayed on sale with lower limits. When the pause began, Sottiaux said the $200 accounts “put the most strain on our systems.” The load came from GPT-6 Astra, whose computer-use feature can burn through usage allowances faster than GPT 5.6 Sol, OpenAI said, as reported by Fortune.

The 50% figure has come up before this month. On September 22 OpenAI cut API prices for GPT-6 Sol and Luna by half, which put Sol at $2/$10 per million input/output tokens. OpenAI has not said which prices the new Pro calculation uses, so the change in dollars may not match the change in actual tokens.

One limit is not coming back: the reopened plan has no five-hour usage window. Testing Catalog says OpenAI expects even more efficient models soon. It also says a new $500 plan is potentially on the way, and that taken together with the halved allowance, this “doesn’t look very good for any ChatGPT Pro user.”

A day before the pause, on September 9, Sottiaux warned that Astra demand might force OpenAI to stop new Pro sign-ups for a while: “I’ve not seen anything like it until now and we went through very steep growth before.”