AI coding pricing fight
OpenAI launched a $100/month ChatGPT Pro tier positioned for heavy coding users, explicitly targeting Anthropic's higher-end offering. Claude’s web traffic has increased roughly fivefold over the past year, suggesting developers are actively comparing high‑throughput coding services and price tiers. (thenextweb.com) (officechai.com)
OpenAI rolled out a new $100-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan on April 9, aiming at developers who hit coding limits before they hit budget limits. (thenextweb.com) The new tier sits between ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month and OpenAI’s existing $200 Pro plan. OpenAI said it includes five times more Codex access than Plus, with a 10 times launch promotion running through May. (venturebeat.com) (thenextweb.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding assistant inside ChatGPT, and usage caps matter most to people who spend hours generating, editing, and testing software. OpenAI’s pricing page lists Codex seats and credits across ChatGPT plans, underscoring that coding has become a separate product line, not just a chatbot feature. (chatgpt.com) (openai.com) Anthropic already sells a Claude Max plan at the same $100 monthly price, plus a $200 Max tier. Anthropic says the $100 version gives five times more usage per session than Claude Pro, while the $200 version gives 20 times more. (claude.com) That puts the fight on a simpler question than model benchmarks: how much coding capacity a developer gets before the meter slows them down. TechCrunch reported OpenAI “makes no bones” that the new tier is meant to challenge Anthropic’s long-standing $100 option. (techcrunch.com) Developers have been moving enough between these tools for traffic data to show it. Similarweb estimates claude.ai drew 1.08 billion visits in the first quarter of 2026, up from about 230 million in the first quarter of 2025, according to OfficeChai’s report on the data. (officechai.com) Similarweb’s own March 2026 snapshot ranks claude.ai No. 3 in the United States “AI Chatbots and Tools” category, behind chatgpt.com and gemini.google.com. The same page shows 613.7 million total visits in March alone, though Similarweb labels the figures as estimates. (similarweb.com) Anthropic’s rise has not closed ChatGPT’s lead, but it has made the premium tier more crowded. OpenAI now has free, Go, Plus, $100 Pro, $200 Pro, Business, and Enterprise options on its pricing stack. (chatgpt.com) (openai.com) The immediate result is that coding users who once had a wide price gap between $20 and $200 now have a middle rung at exactly the number Anthropic chose first. In this market, the headline is no longer just which model writes better code, but which subscription lets developers keep coding longer for the same $100. (claude.com) (thenextweb.com)
