OpenAI’s $100 Pro Plan
OpenAI quietly introduced a new $100-per-month ChatGPT Pro tier aimed at heavy coding users, basically a middle ground between its cheaper plan and the $200 Pro offering. (cnbc.com) The company is positioning this for Codex users as usage surges — Codex had a run-rate revenue above $2.5 billion in February and reportedly more than doubled since the start of 2026. ( )
OpenAI had a pricing hole: ChatGPT jumped from Plus at $20 a month to Pro at $200, and on April 9 it slipped in a new $100 option built around heavier use of Codex, its coding tool inside ChatGPT. The pitch is simple: the $100 tier gets 5 times more Codex usage than Plus, while the $200 tier stays in place for people running much bigger workloads. OpenAI said the new plan is for “longer, high-effort Codex sessions,” not casual prompting. Codex is the part of ChatGPT that writes code, reviews code, and handles software tasks more like a junior engineer than a chatbot answering trivia. OpenAI’s own developer pricing page says Codex is now built into Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Education, and Enterprise plans. That matters because coding use burns through limits faster than normal chat. OpenAI says bigger codebases, longer tasks, and sessions that force Codex to hold more context all consume more allowance per message. OpenAI is making this move while Codex demand is climbing fast. CNBC reported Codex was already running at more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue in February, and more than doubled from the start of 2026. The user numbers are moving the same way. Sam Altman said this week that Codex had 3 million weekly users, and 9to5Mac reported that OpenAI described that as a 5 times increase in three months with 70 percent month-over-month usage growth. The competitor in the background is Anthropic. CNBC said Anthropic’s Claude Code already uses a ladder with Free, paid tiers, and top-end $100 and $200 options, so OpenAI is now mirroring the same two price points for power users. OpenAI is also sweetening the launch. 9to5Mac reported that through May 31, Pro $100 subscribers get up to 10 times the Codex usage of Plus, even though the standard positioning is 5 times. The company’s public pricing pages show how central coding has become to ChatGPT’s bundle. The consumer pricing page says Pro now centers on “maximum Codex tasks,” while the Codex pricing page describes the $200 tier as for “daily full-time development.” A year ago, Codex was a product launch. CNBC said OpenAI first launched Codex in April 2025, made it widely available in October, and then shipped a standalone Mac app in February 2026. Now it is important enough to reshape ChatGPT’s price ladder around it.
