OpenAI launches $100 Pro tier

OpenAI didn’t just cut the price of its top ChatGPT plan in half. On April 9, OpenAI added a new $100-a-month Pro option while keeping the old $200 Pro plan, so there are now two Pro tiers sitting above Plus instead of one. (help.openai.com) The new $100 plan is built around Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. OpenAI says it gives 5 times the Codex usage of ChatGPT Plus, and through May 31, 2026, it is temporarily boosted to 10 times Plus usage. (community.openai.com) The $200 plan did not go away. OpenAI says that tier now gets 20 times the Codex usage of Plus, which turns the two Pro plans into a ladder: Plus for lighter work, $100 Pro for heavy individual use, and $200 Pro for people who hit limits constantly. (help.openai.com) OpenAI is also selling this as continuity, not a downgrade. The company says both Pro plans keep the same core ChatGPT capabilities, including the exclusive Pro model and unlimited access to its Instant and Thinking models, with the main difference being how much Codex work you can do before limits bite. (community.openai.com) That tells you what OpenAI thinks people are paying for now. The scarce thing is no longer just access to a smart chatbot; it is sustained compute for long coding sessions, parallel projects, and agent-style work that keeps running instead of answering in one shot. (community.openai.com) OpenAI’s own pricing pages already show a wider ladder around that idea. ChatGPT now lists Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise as separate paid plans, and the Codex pricing page says Codex is included across Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Education, and Enterprise, with extra credits available when users hit plan limits. (openai.com) (developers.openai.com) That matters because coding agents are expensive in a different way from normal chat. A quick question uses one burst of compute, but a coding agent can read files, run longer reasoning chains, and keep working across multiple tasks, which is why OpenAI is now charging by how much agent work a person needs, not just by whether they want “premium” access. (help.openai.com) (community.openai.com) The release notes show the same pattern on the product side. OpenAI says GPTs with Custom Actions now support GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 on ChatGPT web tiers, which means user-built assistants are getting stronger models while OpenAI keeps deciding which features appear first on consumer plans and which stay packaged for bigger accounts. (help.openai.com) So the $100 plan is less a sale than a sorting tool. It gives OpenAI a place to put the developer who has outgrown Plus but does not need the full $200 tier, and it lets the company charge more precisely for the people who consume the most compute. (help.openai.com) (9to5mac.com) The clearest signal is that OpenAI announced this change in a Codex context, not as a general ChatGPT makeover. In 2026, the company is treating coding as one of the first places where users will pay real money for higher limits, because that is where hitting the ceiling costs time, missed output, and sometimes a delayed product launch. (community.openai.com) (9to5mac.com)