OpenAI adds $100 tier

OpenAI just put a $100-a-month step in the middle of its consumer lineup after leaving a huge gap between ChatGPT Plus at $20 and the older Pro plan at $200. The new plan went live on April 9, 2026, and it is aimed at people who hit coding limits before they hit their patience limit. (openai.com) The pitch is not “new magic,” but “more room to work.” OpenAI says the $100 plan is built for “real projects,” while the $20 Plus plan is for lighter use throughout the week and the $200 Pro plan is for continuous heavy workflows across parallel projects. (openai.com) The tool at the center of this is Codex, which is OpenAI’s coding agent for writing, reviewing, and shipping software. It works inside a terminal, an integrated development environment, the web, GitHub, and the ChatGPT iPhone app, so usage limits matter the same way data caps matter on a phone plan. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) OpenAI says the $100 plan gets 5 times the Codex rate limits of Plus as the standard offer. On the Codex pricing page, OpenAI also says there is a temporary usage boost that raises that to 20 times Plus for some cases, and that boost runs until May 31, 2026. (openai.com) That sounds confusing because OpenAI is now using the same word, “Pro,” for two different price points. Its help pages describe the $100 plan as the middle option for advanced weekly use, while outside reporting says the older $200 plan remains in place for people who want the same tools with much higher allowance. (openai.com) (thetechportal.com) The model access is part of the sell. OpenAI released GPT-5.4 on March 5, 2026, calling it its most capable and efficient frontier model for professional work, and launched GPT-5.4 Pro at the same time for users who want maximum performance on complex tasks. (openai.com) The $100 plan also includes GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark in research preview, which OpenAI describes as a fast coding model for day-to-day work. OpenAI’s model page says that model is available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers and is tuned for near-instant coding iteration instead of slower, deeper runs. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) This change comes one week after OpenAI changed Codex billing on April 2, 2026, from per-message pricing to token-based pricing for new and existing Plus, Pro, and Business users. In plain English, OpenAI is moving coding access away from a “count the chats” system and toward a “count the compute” system. (openai.com) The business backdrop is simple: coding assistants are becoming their own subscription category. CNBC reported that OpenAI is pushing harder against Anthropic, whose Claude subscriptions already had a $100 option tied to heavier Claude Code usage. (cnbc.com) So the real news is not just a new price tag. OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into a ladder of compute budgets, where $20 is for trying advanced tools, $100 is for people who code with them every week, and $200 is for people who want the limits to get out of the way almost entirely. (openai.com)