OpenAI launches $100 Pro tier
OpenAI introduced a new $100-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan aimed at heavy Codex (coding assistant) users, positioning it between the $20 Plus tier and pricier enterprise options. The new tier reportedly offers about five times the Codex usage of Plus, signalling that model access is being sold as professional infrastructure rather than consumer novelty and forcing teams to treat AI spend like an operational line item. (techcrunch.com)
OpenAI just filled in the awkward gap between a $20 ChatGPT Plus subscription and a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription with a new $100 plan aimed at people who use Codex all day, not once in a while. The company announced it on April 9, 2026, and said the new tier gives about five times the Codex usage of Plus. (community.openai.com, techcrunch.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent inside ChatGPT, and it is built for jobs like writing features, fixing bugs, answering questions about a codebase, and proposing pull requests. OpenAI says each Codex task runs in its own cloud sandbox, which makes it closer to a remote junior engineer than a one-shot autocomplete tool. (openai.com, openai.com) The pricing ladder matters because OpenAI had a steep jump before this. Its public pricing page shows ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month, while its developer pricing page had listed Pro at $200 per month for individuals using Codex heavily. (openai.com, developers.openai.com) The new $100 tier is not a stripped-down experiment. OpenAI’s announcement says it still includes all Pro features inside ChatGPT, including the exclusive Pro model and unlimited access to its Instant and Thinking models, while changing the main bottleneck for coders: how much Codex they can actually run. (community.openai.com) OpenAI also attached a launch promo to make the jump feel bigger right away. Through May 31, 2026, the company says $100 Pro subscribers can get up to 10 times the Codex usage of ChatGPT Plus, and for parallel projects it says limits can run as high as 20 times Plus during the bonus period. (community.openai.com) That tells you what OpenAI thinks people are buying now. The company is no longer just selling smarter answers in a chat box; it is selling capacity, the way a cloud company sells more storage or more compute hours when a team’s workload grows. (community.openai.com, openai.com) You can see the same shift on the business side. Last week OpenAI rolled out pay-as-you-go pricing for Codex in ChatGPT Business and Enterprise, which lets companies start with usage-based spending instead of buying a large fixed package up front. (openai.com, openai.com) That change fits the way Codex is being pitched. OpenAI’s Codex app for macOS is built around multiple agents, parallel workflows, and long-running tasks, which means the product is designed for sustained engineering work rather than quick consumer prompts. (openai.com, openai.com) The competitive angle is hard to miss. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI’s new $100 price point lines up against Anthropic, whose Claude product has long had a $100-per-month option for heavy users, so OpenAI is now matching a price band that developers already recognize. (techcrunch.com) What changed in one day is simple: a coding assistant that used to force users to choose between “casual” at $20 and “serious” at $200 now has a middle setting priced like a software seat. For solo developers and small teams, that turns artificial intelligence coding help from a novelty purchase into something that can sit on the same monthly budget line as GitHub, Figma, or a cloud server. (openai.com, developers.openai.com, techcrunch.com)
