ChatGPT Now Has a $200-a-Month Tier

OpenAI's new Pro subscription, ten times the price of the existing one, offers unlimited use of its most capable reasoning program and a version that thinks longer on hard problems. It's aimed at researchers and engineers, and it's a sign of what the programs cost to run.

OpenAI introduced a new subscription today called ChatGPT Pro, priced at $200 a month. It includes unlimited access to o1, the reasoning program the company released in preview in September and made final today, plus a "pro mode" that lets the program think longer on the hardest problems, and unlimited use of the voice feature. The existing $20 plan continues.

Two hundred dollars a month is a lot for a chatbot, and the company is not pretending otherwise: it says the tier is for "researchers, engineers, and other individuals who use research-grade intelligence daily." What the price reveals is the cost side of the business. A program that thinks before it answers uses far more computing time per question than one that answers immediately, and computing time is the one thing OpenAI has to buy. Reports this year have put the company's spending well above its revenue, with the gap covered by investors.

The announcement kicked off what OpenAI is calling twelve days of releases, one each weekday until the holidays. Its rivals will presumably not sit quietly through it.

For most people the news is that nothing changes; the $20 version and the free version are what they were. For the industry the news is a price signal. Two years ago the question was whether anyone would pay for this. Today the question is how much.