OpenAI halves $200 plan allowance, launches $500 plan

On Tuesday, OpenAI introduced a new $ 500-per-month Pro plan that gives subscribers the highest included usage of the company’s subscription plans. The new plan includes 25x the usage allowance of ChatGPT Plus and provides access to its Ultrafast tier for GPT-6 Astra — which promises to generate tokens at up to 8x the standard speed in Codex. Ultrafast for GPT-6.1 Sol is coming soon. The $200 Pro plan cut But what’s also coming soon will upset quite a few people: Starting October 30, OpenAI is cutting the usage allowance in its $200 Pro plan for ChatGPT Work and Codex from 20x the allowance of the $20 Plus plan to only 10x. In addition, subscribers to the $200 Pro plan will also see their GPT-6 Pro allowance in Chat fall from 200 messages per week to 100. Existing subscribers will keep their current limits through October 29. After that, they will get a grant of 62,500 usage credits (worth $2,500, OpenAI says) that will expire on December 31, 2026. If you’re looking for a glimmer of good news: OpenAI says it won’t reintroduce the 5-hour limit for subscribers on the $200 plan, so you can now burn through your weekly usage at your own pace (and likely faster than you want). OpenAI’s argument: you’ll still get more done Tibo Sottiaux, the company’s head of product and platform, previewed this change on X ahead of the official announcement. The developer reactions were expectedly negative (“Ok guys, back to claude. RIP openAI 🪦”). Sottiaux argues that developers will “still get more work done than if you were on the Pro $200 subscription one month ago.” Hi, Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscriptions to new subscribers, but together with it we are also changing how we calculate the usage for it. In effect, if you do the math, it will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan. Now that… — Tibo (@thsottiaux) September 29, 2026 Cheaper, more efficient models, OpenAI argues, will let subscribers get more work done than they could a month ago, even with half the included allowance. And that may be true in some form, but that’s not what users signed up for when they bought the $200 plan. What they want is for OpenAI to pass down the efficiencies it gains so they can do far more work — without having to pay for a $500 plan. OpenAI was likely also aware of how this would be perceived; otherwise, it might not have decided to front-run the announcement. As of now, it’s unclear what exactly the included allowance in the $500 plan will be. For now, existing subscribers will keep their current limits during this transition period, though it’s unclear how long it will last. OpenAI also promises to give those users a one-time credit “to help with the change.” The 20x standard across labs For the longest time, the 20x allowance of the highest-priced tier was the standard among frontier labs. For Google, that’s true for the top Gemini AI Ultra plan, which costs $200 per month, as well as Anthropic’s top-tier $200-per-month plan. Google’s plan, though, also includes storage and other benefits. All of these labs also offer $100 plans with what remains the standard 5x allowance. Let’s see whether OpenAI sets a trend here or whether negative pushback is so strong that the company undoes the change. The post OpenAI halves $200 plan allowance, launches $500 plan appeared first on The New Stack.