OpenAI adds $100 ChatGPT Pro tier

OpenAI just inserted a new price step into ChatGPT: not the familiar $20 Plus plan, and not the old $200 Pro plan, but a new $100 Pro tier built around people who spend long stretches coding with Codex. TechCrunch reported the change on April 9, 2026, and OpenAI’s own forum post said the tier is meant for “longer, high-effort Codex sessions.” (techcrunch.com) (community.openai.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding tool inside ChatGPT, and the company is now treating coding time like a separate product instead of a side feature. The new $100 tier includes five times more Codex usage than ChatGPT Plus, while Plus stays at $20 a month. (help.openai.com) (techcrunch.com) OpenAI also kept the higher $200 Pro option alive, which means this was not a rename. TechCrunch said the $200 plan is still available even though OpenAI’s pricing page did not clearly list it at launch, so the company now has a three-step ladder for individuals who code: $20, $100, and $200. (techcrunch.com) The immediate reason is simple: some users were hitting the gap between “cheap enough for hobby use” and “expensive enough for near-enterprise use.” OpenAI’s forum post says the $100 plan still includes all Pro features, including the exclusive Pro model and unlimited access to its Instant and Thinking models, but with a Codex allowance sized for heavier daily work. (community.openai.com) OpenAI paired the new plan with something companies usually avoid publishing so plainly: a rate card. Its Codex help page now spells out how usage is counted, notes that some plans are moving from per-message pricing to pricing aligned with application programming interface token usage, and says Plus and Pro users can buy extra credits after they hit their limits. (help.openai.com) (developers.openai.com) That rate card matters because coding agents burn through far more work than a normal chatbot conversation. A single coding session can mean scanning a codebase, editing multiple files, rerunning tasks, and checking results, so OpenAI is now charging more like a cloud tool that meters heavy use than like a flat entertainment subscription. (help.openai.com) (developers.openai.com) OpenAI is also making this move while rivals are already training customers to pay more for code-focused artificial intelligence. TechCrunch said OpenAI is explicitly taking aim at Anthropic, which has long offered a $100-a-month Claude tier, so this is partly a pricing response to a competitor that normalized triple-digit subscriptions for serious users. (techcrunch.com) The company even added a launch incentive to push people into the new middle tier quickly. OpenAI said that through May 31, 2026, the $100 Pro subscribers get up to 10 times the Codex usage of ChatGPT Plus, double the standard five-times difference. (community.openai.com) (9to5mac.com) Behind the pricing tweak is a bigger bet that coding has become one of ChatGPT’s clearest paid use cases. CNBC reported that Codex run-rate revenue was above $2.5 billion in February 2026 and had more than doubled since the start of 2026, which helps explain why OpenAI is now slicing the market more finely instead of leaving one huge jump from $20 to $200. (cnbc.com) So the new $100 tier is less about adding one more badge to a pricing page and more about admitting what the product has become. ChatGPT is no longer priced only like a chatbot for consumers; for developers and small teams, it is starting to look like a work tool where the main thing you buy is sustained coding capacity. (techcrunch.com) (help.openai.com)