OpenAI Reopens ChatGPT Pro $200 Sign-Ups With New Usage Calculation

OpenAI will reopen new subscriptions to its ChatGPT Pro $200 plan on September 30, 2026, with a recalculated usage model that Tibo, who works on Codex and ChatGPT at OpenAI, said will net out at half the old plan’s dollar value in API spend.

Tibo announced the change in a post on X published on September 29, 2026, writing that under the new calculation the subscription “will net out at half the dollar in API spend compared to the old Pro $200 plan.” He said he wanted subscribers to understand the terms ahead of a series of company announcements scheduled for the same day sign-ups resume, and he said subscribers will still get more work done than they would have on the Pro $200 plan a month earlier.

Pause Rules and the One-Time Return

OpenAI’s Help Center documentation records that the company paused new sign-ups and upgrades to the Pro $200 plan, also labeled Pro 20x, as of September 10, 2026. The pause applied to customers moving from the Free, Go, Plus, and Pro $100 tiers. Existing Pro $200 subscriptions continued to renew as usual, and the Pro $100 plan remained available for people who wanted Pro capabilities with lower usage.

During the pause, customers who held Pro $200 access on September 10, 2026, or whose access had ended in the 30 days before that date, qualified for a one-time return. The return option stayed available for 30 days after a customer’s access ended, including after a cancellation, a failed renewal payment, or a downgrade, and was exercised by signing in and purchasing through the pricing page at chatgpt.com. Customers who canceled or scheduled a downgrade kept Pro $200 until the end of their current billing cycle and could undo the change in billing settings before the cycle ended. New Pro $200 promotion redemptions were also paused, while promotions already redeemed and active were unaffected.

Weekly Usage Without the Five-Hour Limit

Tibo said OpenAI did not want to compromise in other ways and is committing to not reintroducing the five-hour usage limit, so subscribers can fully use their weekly usage whenever they want. He said the subscription also carries a guarantee that, over time, subscribers always get more work done at an increasing level of quality, because models keep getting more efficient and OpenAI passes the improvements down in the form of API price reductions.

The Pro $200 plan is OpenAI’s highest usage tier, unlocking 20 times the usage of the Plus plan, while the Pro $100 plan unlocks five times Plus usage, according to the Help Center. All Pro tiers include access to Pro models, Codex, Deep research, image creation, memory, and file uploads, and the Pro plan includes access to GPT-5 and legacy models. Some models carry separate usage allowances that can differ between Pro tiers; when a subscriber reaches a model’s allowance, that model may become temporarily unavailable until the allowance resets, and there is no setting to increase or bypass a model’s usage allowance.

Usage must adhere to OpenAI’s Terms of Use, which prohibit abusive usage such as automatically or programmatically extracting data, sharing account credentials, and reselling access or using ChatGPT to power third-party services. OpenAI states that its guardrails against misuse can occasionally result in a temporary usage restriction, that ChatGPT will notify the user when that happens, and that access is restored if the company finds no policy-violating behavior. OpenAI Support does not reset ChatGPT or Codex usage limits; users who reach a limit are told to wait until it resets or to use another available option in their account.

Pricing Rationale and the Pay-Per-Use Direction

Tibo said OpenAI does not want to give itself an incentive to artificially inflate API list prices to make a subscription look generous, or to work around those prices through discounts. Instead, he said, the company wants to keep rapidly reducing prices and increasing the capabilities of models on the API. He noted that OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna at 50% of their previous price; OpenAI’s news index lists the introduction of the two models under September 22, 2026.

Over time, Tibo said, OpenAI sees prices falling low enough that it will make sense for most customers to buy usage as needed, without a significant gap between what a subscription provides and what the API provides for a dollar spent.

Tibo added that OpenAI will add more things to the subscription on September 30, 2026, that will not draw on the usage allowance. He did not disclose what the additions will be.