OpenAI Has Halved the Price of ChatGPT Pro.
While ChatGPT may have ushered in the era of generative AI we now live in, it’s far from alone today. The field faces fierce competition from numerous companies, including Google, Anthropic, and even Microsoft, which holds a significant financial stake in OpenAI. To compete, OpenAI appears to be trying to make its paid subscriptions more attractive to users, as the company just halved the price of ChatGPT Pro.
ChatGPT Pro now starts at $100.
As TechCrunch reports , OpenAI’s new pricing model now offers a Pro plan for $100 per month, up from $200. Users now have the following options: a free plan with ads ; a Go plan with higher usage limits for $8 per month (also with ads); a Plus plan with additional models and exclusive features for $20 per month; and finally, a Pro plan with the highest usage limits for all the company’s models and features for $100 per month. OpenAI no longer offers the $200 plan, but confirmed to TechCrunch that the option is still available.
If you use ChatGPT for everyday tasks, you might be daunted by the idea of spending $100 a month on a chatbot, let alone $200. But the Pro plans aren’t designed for casual users; instead, they’re aimed at programmers who rely on AI to help them develop programs. In this case, that’s through Codex, a programming tool from OpenAI. OpenAI told TechCrunch that its Pro plan now offers five times more access to Codex than the Plus plan, which may appeal to advanced users. (The hidden $200 plan offers limits 20 times higher than Plus, or four times higher than the $100 Pro plan.)
OpenAI is also targeting power users, particularly those interested in Anthropic’s Claude Code tool, which also offers a $100/month plan. And that’s not just speculation: an OpenAI spokesperson explicitly confirmed that they believe Codex offers more features for the price than Claude Code: “The new $100 Pro plan is designed to give developers more practical programming capabilities for the price, especially during intensive work sessions when constraints matter most. Compared to Claude Code, Codex provides more programming capabilities for the price across all paid plans, with the difference most apparent during active programming use.”
The race for artificial intelligence continues to gain momentum.
OpenAI still commands the majority of the generative AI user base. Back in February, the company announced that its weekly active users had surpassed 900 million, with over 50 million consumer subscribers. Anthropic doesn’t disclose its total user count, but some estimates place its consumer base at between 18 and 30 million, and a company spokesperson told TechCrunch that paid subscriptions have more than doubled this year. At best, that’s 30 million users versus 900 million.
But Anthropic appears to be making more money than OpenAI. On Monday, Anthropic announced that its annual revenue had surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion by the end of 2025. OpenAI claims to be making $2 billion per month, which equates to roughly $24 billion annually—at least for now. My observations suggest that many programmers are talking about using Claude Code , and far fewer about using ChatGPT Codex. While there are many AI companies in the market, the fact that OpenAI directly mentioned Anthropic in this price cut shows that they view it as a direct competitor. It will be interesting to see how other factors change as the race heats up. Will OpenAI cut costs, as it did when it shut down Sora and abandoned its AI-based video models? Time will tell.
Note: In April 2025, Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company infringed Ziff Davis’s copyright in the training and operation of its artificial intelligence systems.