OpenAI rolls a $100 Pro tier

OpenAI just split its paid ChatGPT lineup again: there is now a $100-a-month Pro plan sitting between Plus at $20 and the older Pro plan at $200. The new tier went live on April 9, 2026, and OpenAI says it is aimed at people doing longer coding sessions in Codex. (community.openai.com, help.openai.com) Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent inside ChatGPT, and the company describes it as a tool that can help write, review, and ship code faster. You can use it on the web, in the command line interface, in an integrated development environment extension, and on iPhone. (help.openai.com, developers.openai.com) The new $100 plan is mostly a usage product, not a new feature product. OpenAI says it includes the same core Pro capabilities, but with 5 times the usage allowance of ChatGPT Plus instead of the 20 times allowance on the $200 plan. (help.openai.com, developers.openai.com) For the launch window, OpenAI is sweetening that with a temporary Codex boost through May 31, 2026. During that period, the $100 plan gets up to 10 times the Codex usage of Plus, while the $200 plan gets 20 times the Codex usage of Plus. (community.openai.com, help.openai.com, developers.openai.com) That tells you what OpenAI thinks the bottleneck is right now. The scarce thing is not access to the chatbot itself but sustained compute for coding agents that may run longer, think longer, and work across parallel projects. (help.openai.com, community.openai.com) OpenAI’s own pricing page now reads like a staircase. Plus is the everyday plan, Pro starts at $100 for higher limits, and Business is priced separately per user for teams that want a shared workspace instead of one person buying more headroom alone. (openai.com, developers.openai.com) There is also a product signal buried in the fine print: the old $200 Pro plan is not going away. OpenAI says that plan remains the highest-usage option, so the new $100 tier is an extra rung, not a replacement. (help.openai.com, help.openai.com) That kind of ladder matters because coding agents burn through limits differently than normal chat. OpenAI updated Codex pricing on April 2, 2026, to align with token usage instead of per-message pricing, which means longer or heavier coding runs map more directly to compute consumed. (help.openai.com) So the new $100 plan is basically a middle lane for people who have outgrown Plus but do not need the always-on headroom of the $200 tier. It gives OpenAI a way to charge hobbyists $20, serious solo coders $100, and the heaviest individual users $200 without changing the core ChatGPT product underneath. (help.openai.com, openai.com, community.openai.com)