OpenAI moves Codex upmarket
OpenAI introduced a $100/month ChatGPT Pro tier that expands access and raises usage limits for Codex, its coding assistant, marking a clear product move toward heavier professional users. At the same time OpenAI has updated Codex pricing for Business, Enterprise and Education to token‑based billing, which aligns coding copilots with measurable consumption and procurement. That signals the market shifting from novelty to governed, budgeted deployment where spend visibility and consumption metrics matter. (cnbc.com, help.openai.com)
OpenAI just put a $100-a-month price tag on heavier use of Codex, its coding assistant inside ChatGPT, and that creates a new middle step between the $20 Plus plan and the older $200 Pro plan. The company said the new tier gives 5 times more Codex usage than Plus, with a temporary boost of up to 10 times through May 31, 2026. (cnbc.com, community.openai.com) That sounds like a simple pricing tweak, but it changes who Codex is for. A $20 plan fits occasional code help, while a $100 plan is aimed at people running longer sessions and several projects at once. (cnbc.com, community.openai.com) OpenAI did not remove the old $200 Pro level when it added the $100 one. The $200 tier still sits above it for “heavy lifting,” with about 20 times the Plus limits, so the ladder is now $20 for steady use, $100 for serious use, and $200 for the people who want the meter to feel almost invisible. (cnbc.com, community.openai.com) This is also a direct answer to Anthropic, whose Claude Code has been gaining ground with developers. CNBC reported that Anthropic already sells top Claude tiers at $100 and $200 a month, so OpenAI is no longer leaving that price band to a rival. (cnbc.com) The backdrop is that coding assistants are no longer a side feature inside chatbots. CNBC said Codex had 3 million weekly users as of Sam Altman’s April 7 post, and the tool’s run-rate revenue had passed $2.5 billion in February after growing more than 100 percent since the start of 2026. (cnbc.com) OpenAI made a second change on April 2 that matters even more to companies than the $100 consumer tier. For ChatGPT Business and new Enterprise workspaces, Codex stopped charging by message and started charging by tokens, which are the small chunks of text a model reads and writes. (help.openai.com, openai.com) Token billing is closer to an electricity meter than an all-you-can-eat buffet. OpenAI’s help page now lists separate rates per 1 million input tokens, cached input tokens, and output tokens, so a company can see whether cost came from large codebases being read, repeated context being reused, or long answers being generated. (help.openai.com) OpenAI paired that billing change with a new seat structure for teams. On April 2, it said ChatGPT Business and Enterprise customers can add Codex-only seats with no fixed seat fee, while broader ChatGPT Business seats still include Codex limits and the annual Business price dropped from $25 to $20 per seat. (openai.com) That is the kind of packaging companies use when a tool moves from demo to budget line. OpenAI says Codex usage inside ChatGPT Business and Enterprise has grown 6 times since January, and more than 9 million paying business users now rely on ChatGPT for work. (openai.com) The old way to sell coding assistants was simple seats and fuzzy limits. The new way is a consumer ladder for solo developers and a usage meter for procurement teams, which is how software starts getting compared, approved, and cut back like cloud spending instead of being treated like a fun subscription. (help.openai.com, openai.com, cnbc.com)
