OpenAI Introduces $100 Pro

OpenAI just filled in the weirdest hole in its pricing ladder: until April 9, 2026, a coder choosing ChatGPT had to jump from $20 a month for Plus straight to $200 a month for Pro, and now there is a new $100 tier in the middle. That new plan is built around Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant, and OpenAI says it gives 5 times more Codex usage than the $20 Plus plan for people doing “longer, high-effort” coding sessions. The old $200 Pro plan did not disappear. OpenAI still offers it, and TechCrunch reported that the $200 tier carries 20 times the Plus limits while the new $100 tier sits between Plus and that top plan. This is not just a price cut. It is OpenAI answering Anthropic with almost the same shape of menu, because Anthropic already sells a Claude Max plan starting at $100 a month and another at $200 a month, with higher Claude Code limits at those levels. The fight is moving toward coding because coding agents are turning into daily work tools, not novelty demos. CNBC reported that Codex had more than 3 million weekly users, and Sam Altman said OpenAI was resetting usage limits every additional million users until the product reaches 10 million users. OpenAI is also changing how businesses pay for Codex. On April 2, 2026, the company switched ChatGPT Business and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans from per-message pricing to token-based pricing, which means billing now tracks how much text goes in and how much text comes out instead of counting each request like a punch card. OpenAI’s help page says the new business rate card charges credits per 1 million input tokens, cached input tokens, and output tokens, with GPT-5.4 priced at 62.50 credits for input and 375 credits for output. OpenAI also says fast mode burns credits at double the normal rate. That billing change tells you who OpenAI thinks Codex is for now. A casual user can live inside a flat monthly subscription, but a company running code reviews, cloud tasks, and automated jobs all day looks more like an application programming interface customer buying electricity by the meter. OpenAI’s own developer pricing page now says teams can start Codex with “no fixed monthly costs,” while Business customers can add standard seats or usage-based seats depending on how their developers work. That is a different pitch from selling everyone the same unlimited-feeling subscription. So the real news is two pricing systems arriving at once. Individuals got a new $100 rung to keep heavy coders from jumping to Claude, and businesses got token billing that treats AI coding less like a chat app and more like cloud infrastructure.