If you thought $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus felt like a commitment, OpenAI just raised the bar considerably. The company has announced a new Pro subscription tier priced at $100 per month, and it's clearly aimed at a very specific kind of power user.
According to The Verge, the new Pro plan is built around Codex, OpenAI's coding-focused tool. Subscribers get five times more Codex usage than the existing Plus tier, and OpenAI describes it as best suited for "longer, high-effort Codex sessions." In other words, this isn't for someone who occasionally asks ChatGPT to help debug a script - it's for developers doing serious, sustained work.
The real story: competition is heating up
The timing here is telling. OpenAI is rolling out this tier just as Anthropic's Claude Code tool has been picking up real momentum among developers. Anthropic has its own premium "Max" tier for Claude, also priced at $100 per month - making this a very deliberate head-to-head matchup.
It's a smart move from OpenAI's perspective. Coding is one of the most concrete, measurable use cases for AI tools, and developers who rely on these tools daily are exactly the kind of users willing to pay a premium if the product genuinely saves them time. The question is whether ChatGPT's Codex can hold its own against Claude Code, which has built a loyal following in developer communities.
What this means for the average user
For most people, none of this changes anything. The $20 Plus plan remains available, and the free tier isn't going anywhere. The Pro tier is squarely targeting professionals and teams for whom AI coding assistance is a core part of their workflow - not a nice-to-have.
But the broader trend is worth paying attention to. We're watching AI companies move aggressively upmarket, competing fiercely for the users who are deepest in their ecosystems. The race to own the developer audience in particular could shape which platforms end up dominating the AI space long-term.
At $100 a month, OpenAI is betting there are enough serious Codex users out there to make this tier worthwhile - and that they'd rather stay in the ChatGPT ecosystem than jump ship to Anthropic. Whether that bet pays off will say a lot about where this whole industry is heading.
