OpenAI ups Codex pricing

OpenAI just inserted a new price rung into ChatGPT: $100 a month now buys a Pro plan that sits between the $20 Plus plan and the older $200 Pro plan. The company says the new tier is built around heavier Codex use, with 5 times the Codex usage of Plus and priority request processing. (help.openai.com) (developers.openai.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent, which means it is the part of ChatGPT built to write code, review code, and handle longer software tasks instead of just answering one prompt at a time. On OpenAI’s developer site, the new $100 plan also includes access to GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, which OpenAI describes as a fast coding model in research preview. (developers.openai.com 1) (developers.openai.com 2) The pricing shift did not stop at subscriptions. OpenAI’s Codex help page says that, as of April 2, 2026, Codex pricing for new and existing Plus, Pro, ChatGPT Business, and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans moved from per-message billing to token-based billing, which is the same basic meter used in application programming interface pricing. (help.openai.com) A token is a small chunk of text, so token pricing is like paying for electricity by the kilowatt-hour instead of paying a flat fee per appliance. That change makes coding use easier to meter when one user asks for a two-line fix and another asks for a full codebase rewrite that runs for much longer. (help.openai.com) OpenAI is also keeping the old top tier. Its help center says the $200 Pro plan still exists, and it now gets 20 times the Codex usage of Plus, while the new $100 plan is the lower-usage version for people who want the same core Pro features without the highest allowance. (help.openai.com) That makes this less like a simple price increase and more like an airline adding a premium economy seat between coach and business class. OpenAI now has a $20 tier for lighter use, a $100 tier for serious individual developers, and a $200 tier for the people who want the biggest monthly allowance. (help.openai.com) (developers.openai.com) The competitive target is not hard to spot. Economic Times reported the move as a challenge to Anthropic’s Claude Max offering, and Anthropic’s own product pages have been leaning heavily into coding and agent workflows, including Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Code features for developers. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) OpenAI is widening the pricing menu at the same time it is widening the ways Codex gets used. Economic Times reported that some third-party integrations will move to separate pay-as-you-go billing, and OpenAI separately announced flexible Codex pricing for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise teams so companies can start with baseline access and then buy more usage as they scale. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) (openai.com) The bigger pattern is that coding assistants are being sold less like chatbots and more like professional software tools. Once pricing depends on usage, speed, and model tier, the product starts to look like cloud computing: cheap for light work, expensive for heavy work, and designed to pull teams upward as they rely on it more. (help.openai.com) (openai.com)