ChatGPT adds a $500 Pro tier, and Pro 200 returns with a lower allowance
OpenAI has added Pro 500, a ChatGPT plan at $500 a month in US dollars, and reopened Pro 200 to new subscribers at $200 a month on a lower included usage allowance. Both changes are dated September 29 in OpenAI's ChatGPT release notes, and the company's help page for Pro now lists three plans: Pro 100 at $100, Pro 200 at $200 and Pro 500 at $500.
A ChatGPT prompt with a June_Monthly_Expenses.csv spreadsheet attached, asking the model to analyse the month's spending and name three ways to improve the user's finances. Image: OpenAI Image: OpenAI
The date that costs an existing subscriber something is October 29, 2026. A Pro 200 subscription that was active at OpenAI's eligibility cutoff, or during the seven days before it, keeps its previous included allowance only through that date, after which it moves to the lower allowance at the same $200 a month, the help page says.
OpenAI does not publish the eligibility cutoff date, and it publishes no figure for any allowance on any plan, before or after. The reason it gives for the reduction is that the lower allowance reflects "our increasingly efficient models", and it says only affected subscribers receive an email about it.
Ultrafast comes with the $500 plan alone
Pro 500 is the only Pro plan that includes Astra Ultrafast, which OpenAI describes as "a faster service tier for GPT-6 Astra", chosen in the model picker and available in ChatGPT Work and Codex. Buying credits on Pro 100 or Pro 200 does not unlock it at launch.
Ultrafast draws on the plan's included allowance first and on the credit balance after that. OpenAI does not say how much faster it runs.
Pro 500 subscriptions are sold "through ChatGPT on the web at launch". Holding on to a grandfathered allowance brings nothing else with it: "keeping your current allowance does not upgrade your plan or add Ultrafast", OpenAI says.
OpenAI compares the plans only to each other
OpenAI ranks the three allowances without putting a number on any of them: "Pro 200 includes more usage than Pro 100. Pro 500 offers the highest included usage of the three plans." Credits cover eligible usage in Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT for Word, ChatGPT for Excel and ChatGPT for PowerPoint, and Pro is billed monthly only, with neither annual billing nor payment for several months in advance.
Everything else about Pro is unchanged across the three tiers. All of them cover Pro models, Codex, deep research, image creation, memory and file uploads, and a subscriber moves between them from ChatGPT's own plan settings.
A lapsed Pro 200 subscription can still collect the old allowance through October 29 if it ended during the seven days before the cutoff and the subscriber signs up again. OpenAI opened a separate one-time return window for lapsed $200 subscribers on September 22, a week before these changes.
Once a model reaches its limit it can stay unavailable until that allowance resets, and there is no shortcut. Support "cannot reset ChatGPT or Codex limits", OpenAI says, and a limit cannot be raised through a setting.
