OpenAI put a $500 ChatGPT Pro tier on top of a halved $200 allowance
At DevDay 2026 OpenAI added a $500-a-month ChatGPT Pro 500 tier with Ultrafast, and reopened its $200 Pro plan with the included compute allowance halved.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
OpenAI used its DevDay keynote on Tuesday, September 29, to sell two changes: a new $500-a-month ChatGPT tier, and a smaller allowance on the $200 tier it had quietly stopped selling three weeks earlier.
What Happened
Pro 500 is the priciest ChatGPT plan yet, at $6,000 a year. OpenAI says it carries the highest included usage of any subscription, 25 times the ChatGPT Plus allowance, and the only Pro tier with Ultrafast, the company's premium speed tier for GPT-6 Astra, selected in the model picker. In Codex, Ultrafast generates tokens up to eight times faster than standard, about 300 tokens per second.
| Plan | Price | Ultrafast |
|---|---|---|
| Pro 100 | $100/mo | Not included |
| Pro 200 | $200/mo | Not included |
| Pro 500 | $500/mo | Included |
The $200 tier is where the pain lands. OpenAI paused new Pro 200 sign-ups on September 10, then reopened them on Wednesday with a lower allowance. Per OpenAI's Pro help page, the price holds at $200; from October 30 the included usage in ChatGPT Work and Codex falls from 20 times the Plus allowance to 10, and GPT-6 Pro chat messages drop from 200 a week to 100.
Why This Matters
Strip away the product names and what subscribers buy is a compute allowance. The ladder just moved: the ceiling got a new, higher price while the old ceiling's allowance was cut. That is the clearest sign yet that subsidised inference for power users is being repriced, not passed down as models get cheaper to run. DevDay's other headline, the launch of always-on agents, came without a usage bill; this one arrived with two. Tibo Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of product and platform, framed it on X as a wash, saying the change "will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan" while developers would "still get more work done" than a month ago. Users are less convinced: a r/LocalLLaMA thread titled "Looks like the era of subsidised compute is coming to an end" drew roughly 1,200 points and more than 550 comments.
What's Next
OpenAI has published the transition rules but not the number that would settle the argument. Grandfathered subscribers keep their current limits through October 29, then move to the lower allowance at the same price, with a one-time grant of 62,500 usage credits worth $2,500 that expire December 31. What OpenAI still has not published is how it calculates usage per task, or any per-task cost figure. Until those numbers are public, and until someone measures dollars per task across the tiers, "more work for the same money" stays a claim, not a result.
