OpenAI halves ChatGPT Pro 200 usage, drops the five-hour limit and adds a $500 plan
The five-hour window is gone for every Pro plan, but the $200 tier now buys half the usage it did.
On September 29, 2026, OpenAI changed what its ChatGPT Pro plans buy. The $200 plan is open to new subscribers again after a pause that began on September 10, but it now comes with half the usage it had. A new Pro $500 plan sits above it, and it's the only self-serve plan with GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast.
Thibault Sottiaux, who works on Codex and ChatGPT at OpenAI, set out the numbers on X that morning before the DevDay keynote. Pro 200 drops from 20 times the Plus allowance to 10 times. In exchange, OpenAI's Codex pricing page now says Pro plans have no five-hour limit at all.
- Plus
- 1X
- Pro 100
- 5X Plus
- Pro 200
- 10X
- Existing Pro 200
- keep the 20X multiplier for a bit
- Pro $500
- Astra Ultrafast access
- Five-hour limit
- Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit
What changed for Pro 200?
Sottiaux's first post, at 2:41 am ET, was the blunt one. He said the new way of counting usage nets out at half the API-dollar value of the old Pro $200 plan, and then gave OpenAI's reasons.
We didn't want to compromise in other ways and are committing to not reintroducing the 5h limit
So the trade is a smaller weekly pile that you can spend all at once. Before this, the Codex pricing page gave Pro users an estimate of local messages per five-hour window, same as Plus. That window is gone for Pro, though the page still says weekly limits may apply.
Hours later he tried again in plainer terms, with the whole ladder.
I’ll explain the new Pro 200 plan differently, before I start live tweeting from DevDay on things that are going out! Today we are going to ship a number of things that increase what you can do across the Plus and Pro plans. A lot of compute is online for this increase. As we increase the floor, we are changing the relative difference between plans to be Plus = 1X Pro 100 = 5X Pro 200 = 10X and we are reopening subscriptions for Pro 200 (we had paused it). If you have an existing plan you will keep the 20X multiplier for a bit and also receive a lot of additional credits because we know changes are hard even if it means that everyone will get more in the end.
If you're already on Pro 200, you keep 20X "for a bit", in his words, plus extra credits. He didn't give an end date in either post. OpenAI's Pro help page, per the limits watch, now says new subscriptions that aren't eligible for grandfathering get a lower allowance.
What does $500 get you?
Mainly speed. Ultrafast generates GPT-6 Astra tokens up to 8x faster than Standard mode in Codex, and it's available on Pro $500 and eligible Enterprise and Edu plans. It isn't cheap to run (it burns included usage at 8x the Standard rate, then moves on to your credits).
Other self-serve plans don’t have access to Ultrafast at launch, even with purchased credits.
The turnaround surprised me. When Sottiaux announced the pause on September 10, the reason he gave was strain: Pro $200 users "put the most strain on our systems". Now the plan is back at half the size, and he says the extra compute went into raising the floor for Plus and Pro alike.
The three Pro plans now cost $100, $200 and $500 a month, and Plus stays at $20.
More on OpenAI
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- OpenAI's dots are always-on ChatGPT agents that keep working after you close the laptopSeptember 29, 2026
- GPT-3's replacement base models, davinci-002 and babbage-002, hit their shutdown date on September 28September 29, 2026
- Self-replicating prompt injections exist, OpenAI says, and a GPT-5.5 agent passed one on in testingSeptember 29, 2026