ChatGPT’s $200-per-month Pro subscription is getting ready to reopen to new users, but there’s a catch. When it comes back, the way your usage is calculated will look a little different. Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, who leads core products including ChatGPT and Codex, explained the change in a post on X. Under the new system, the $200 Pro plan will effectively come with around half the API-equivalent spend it offered before. Now, that sounds like you’re getting half as much for the same $200, but it’s not quite that straightforward.
API prices for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna were recently cut by 50%. So, those models now eat up less of your allowance, so you should still be able to get roughly the same amount of actual work done. And as the models get cheaper and more efficient, that $200 could stretch even further. There’s another bit of good news for heavy users, too: the five-hour usage window isn’t coming back.
The idea is to make your $200 go further
That means you won’t have to plan your work around a five-hour window anymore. Instead, Pro subscribers can use their weekly allowance whenever they need it. Sottiaux says the goal is for subscribers to gradually get more work done for the same money as models improve and become cheaper to run. And that’s where the API pricing comes into the picture.
Rather than keeping API prices unnecessarily high just to make the Pro subscription look like a better deal, the company plans to keep lowering them as running these models becomes cheaper. We’re already seeing that happen — GPT-6 Sol and Luna both cost 50% less through the API than their GPT-5.6 counterparts. If that trend continues, your weekly allowance could become more useful over time even if the dollar value attached to it doesn’t increase. Eventually, Sottiaux expects those prices to fall far enough that paying for the AI usage you need could make sense for more people, leaving much less of a difference between what your money gets you through a subscription and through the API.
And there’s apparently much more coming
The timing of this change is interesting because it sounds like the Pro subscription is about to get a few other upgrades as well. Sottiaux said he wanted to explain the new usage system before “all the big announcements tomorrow,” teasing several additions that should make the subscriptions more compelling. He didn’t reveal what those additions will be, but he did offer one interesting hint: some of the new perks won’t revolve around giving subscribers more AI usage.
So yes, seeing the API-equivalent value of a $200 subscription effectively cut in half sounds pretty rough. But cheaper models change that equation. If the same allowance can get more done as prices fall, the practical difference may end up being much smaller than the numbers initially suggest. And with more subscription news apparently coming tomorrow, we shouldn’t have to wait long to find out what else that $200 will get you.