OpenAI launches Pro tier
OpenAI introduced a $100/month Pro tier that increases Codex usage—an offer that can matter for agencies relying on heavier coding or research workflows inside their content stacks. The tier includes promotional usage boosts through May 31, signalling continued monetisation and segmentation of advanced AI users. (X/Twitter post quoting OpenAI)
OpenAI just inserted a new price step between its $20 Plus plan and its $200 Pro plan: a $100 Pro option announced on April 9, 2026, built around giving Codex users more room to work. Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent inside ChatGPT, and it does more than autocomplete a line of code. It can read a code repository, edit files, run tests, and work in an isolated cloud sandbox for anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes on a task. That changes what “usage” means. A chatbot answer might take seconds, but a coding agent can spend real compute on a bug fix, a refactor, or a pull request review, which is why OpenAI is now selling bigger buckets for heavier users. The new $100 plan comes with 5 times the Codex usage of ChatGPT Plus as the standard offer. Through May 31, 2026, OpenAI says that same tier is temporarily boosted to as much as 10 times Plus usage. OpenAI did not replace the old top tier. The $200 Pro plan is still there, and OpenAI’s own plan description says it is for “heavy lifting” with 20 times the limits of Plus, including continuous work across parallel projects. This pricing move lands one week after OpenAI changed how teams pay for Codex. On April 2, 2026, the company introduced pay-as-you-go Codex-only seats for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise, with usage billed by token consumption instead of a fixed seat fee. OpenAI also rewired the meter behind the product. Its Help Center says new and existing ChatGPT Business customers, plus new Enterprise customers, now pay for Codex based on input tokens and output tokens, while existing Plus and Pro users are still on a legacy rate card for now. The company is giving a rough spending range for that heavier work: its Codex rate card says average usage runs about $100 to $200 per developer per month, with big variation depending on model choice, fast mode, automations, and how many instances are running. OpenAI is making these changes while Codex adoption is climbing fast inside companies. The company said on April 2 that more than 2 million builders use Codex every week, more than 9 million paying business users rely on ChatGPT for work, and Codex usage inside Business and Enterprise has grown 6 times since January. So the new $100 tier is less a discount than a traffic lane. It gives freelancers, small teams, and agencies a way to buy more coding-agent capacity without jumping straight from $20 to $200, while OpenAI keeps a higher-priced lane for the users running the most parallel, compute-heavy workflows.
