OpenAI expands revenue push

OpenAI is no longer trying to make money from just one kind of customer. On April 9, it added a new $100-a-month ChatGPT plan that sits between the long-standing $20 Plus plan and the older $200 Pro plan. (cnbc.com) That new middle tier is built around Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant inside ChatGPT. OpenAI says it gives 5 times the Codex usage of ChatGPT Plus, which turns a price page into a direct pitch to software developers who were outgrowing the $20 tier. (businesstoday.in) Codex is not a side feature anymore. CNBC reported that Codex has reached about 3 million weekly users, and OpenAI previously said the tool’s revenue run rate was above $2.5 billion in February 2026 after more than doubling since the start of the year. (cnbc.com) The pricing move also closes a strange gap in OpenAI’s lineup. Until this week, an individual user could pay $20 a month or jump all the way to $200, which left a $180 hole between casual use and the most expensive consumer plan. (techcrunch.com, openai.com) OpenAI is making that change while competing head-on with Anthropic, whose Claude Code product is aimed at the same people: developers who want an artificial intelligence system to write, edit, and debug code for hours at a time. CNBC said the new $100 tier was launched as OpenAI tries to challenge Claude Code more directly. (cnbc.com) At the same time, OpenAI is telling investors that subscriptions are only one lane of the business. Axios reported, and Reuters and eMarketer repeated, that OpenAI expects about $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2026 and is targeting $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030. (axios.com, reuters.com, emarketer.com) Those investor slides sketch out the speed OpenAI thinks is possible. The ad forecast rises from $2.5 billion this year to $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028, and $53 billion in 2029, tied to an assumption that OpenAI products could reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030. (emarketer.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) Put together, the company is stacking three businesses on top of each other. There is a mass-market subscription at $20, a heavier-use coding tier at $100, a premium tier at $200, and a separate plan to sell advertising against a product it hopes billions of people will use every week. (openai.com, cnbc.com, axios.com) That is a very different shape from the version of OpenAI most people first met in 2023, when ChatGPT looked like a single chatbot with one obvious upgrade button. In April 2026, it looks more like a software company, a developer-tools company, and an advertising company being built at the same time. (openai.com, axios.com, cnbc.com)