On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new $100/month ChatGPT Pro tier that, while open to anyone, is specifically meant for Codex users.
OpenAI’s Codex app and CLI tool for agentic coding has been a hit for the company, with over 3 million active users, up 5x in the past three months, and 70% growth month-over-month. But until now, there was a steep gap between the amount of work individual developers could do on the $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan and the far more expensive $200/month Pro plan.
This new tier will offer developers 5x more Codex usage than the $20/month Plus tier (with the $200 plan offering 20x), as well as access to the Pro models and deep research capabilities that were previously only available to those who subscribed to the most expensive plan. Users on this plan will also get early access to experimental features.
This all may sound a bit familiar, given that Anthropic offers virtually the same plans, with its $100/month Max tier also offering 5x more usage and the $200/month plan offering 20x.
Anthropic gates some of its enterprise features like Claude in PowerPoint behind the Max plan, though all paying users get access to its flagship models (at least for the time being). For Anthropic, too, the additional usage is likely going to its coding tools, especially now that it has shut off access to OpenClaw and similar claws.
Developers have lately been complaining about how fast they are hitting Claude Code’s usage limits. Part of this was an error on Anthropic’s part, but the general tenor has recently been that Codex, even on the $20/month plan, offered more generous limits. Clearly, that’s something OpenAI has been aware of and now aims to profit from with this new $100/month plan as it looks to sustain the momentum it has built with Codex.
In an email to journalists, announcing this new feature, the company is pretty explicit about this, too: “Compared with Claude Code, Codex delivers more coding capacity per dollar across paid tiers, with the difference showing up most clearly during active coding use.”
OpenAI notes that the $20/month ChatGPT Plus still remains the best option for everyday use.
As has been a bit of a tradition by now, OpenAI is pushing up the usage limits of this new plan for the coming weeks and is giving $100/month Pro users 10x usage until May 31st.
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Before joining The New Stack as its senior editor for AI, Frederic was the enterprise editor at TechCrunch, where he covered everything from the rise of the cloud and the earliest days of Kubernetes to the advent of quantum computing….
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