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ChatGPT's $200 Pro seat buys half the usage from 30 October
OpenAI is halving the usage in its $200 ChatGPT Pro plan from 30 October and adding a $500 plan with its fastest speed. Before buying Pro seats for Space, teams should check who used more than ten times the Plus allowance.
The Product Desk · Product desk
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What happened
- GPT-6 Pro messages in chat also fall from 200 to 100 a week for subscribers on the $200 plan.
- Existing subscribers keep their current limits until 29 October and get a one-time $2,500 grant of usage credits that expires at the end of the year.
- The $500 plan is the only Pro plan with Ultrafast, which OpenAI says generates up to 300 tokens per second in Codex, up to eight times standard speed.
- Space, which replaces Library, is available on Pro, Business and Enterprise plans on web and desktop, with mobile editing still to come.
- Teammates can mention @ChatGPT in Slack and Microsoft Teams channels and threads without holding their own ChatGPT licence.
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Why it matters
- decision Managers now have to choose, seat by seat, between a halved ceiling at $200 and Ultrafast at 2.5 times the price.
- capability A team can put ChatGPT into a busy Slack or Teams channel without buying a seat for everyone who mentions it.
- constraint Pro seats bought in the UK, Switzerland or the EEA come without dots for now, so a European business case for Pro cannot count on the agents.
Picture an engineer who leaves Codex tasks running in the cloud. With the new cloud mode, each task keeps working while the laptop is asleep [14]. From 30 October that engineer gets half the room to do it. OpenAI said the Work and Codex usage in the $200 Pro plan falls on that date from 20 times the Plus allowance to 10 times [2]. At an unchanged pace, the ceiling arrives in half the time [4].
Per unit, the price has doubled. Divide $200 by the old multiple of 20 and each Plus-sized block of Work and Codex usage costs $10. Divide by the new multiple of 10 and it costs $20 [1]. "We believe AI can help bring about a new renaissance of creativity and discovery," OpenAI wrote in its DevDay recap [13]. The lower allowance appears on the Pro help page [6].
The credit grant for existing subscribers covers roughly the first two months of the lower limit and then expires [2].
The upgrade on offer is Pro 500, at $300 a month more than Pro 200 [5]. OpenAI's announcement, as reported, does not say how much Work and Codex usage Pro 500 includes. On the published evidence, moving a heavy user up buys Ultrafast [5]. Nobody can yet show that it restores the old 20-times volume.
The pitch at DevDay was shared work. Space is where teammates, ChatGPT and dots edit pages together [7], and it runs on Pro. Team Tasks, which run on a schedule or when an event such as a new Slack message happens, are limited to Business and Enterprise [8]. By seat count, the Slack and Teams integration is the cheapest of the launches to roll out [9]. According to OpenAI's product page, it asks for approval before it acts in connected tools [10].
The Meetings plugin is the one an admin has to answer for. It is in beta in the Mac desktop app for Pro and Business users. OpenAI's help page says users must tell everyone in the meeting and get their consent first [12]. The app's consent reminder is visible only to the user and does not notify anyone else [12].
For each Pro seat, two facts decide the move. The first is volume: whether the person used more than half of today's Work and Codex allowance, the level at which the 30 October limit starts to bite [4]. The second is speed: whether their work actually waits on Codex output. Low volume with no speed need means Pro 200 still fits, because the cut removes headroom they were not using. Low volume with a speed need means paying $500 for Ultrafast alone [5]. High volume with a speed need is the group Pro 500 was plainly built for. High volume without a speed need is the costly corner. Those users pay the doubled unit price if they stay [1], and moving them costs $300 a month for speed they did not ask for [5]. I would price that group first, before any new Space seats go on the order. The tradeoff is that keeping them on Pro 200 saves the $300 and halves what they can get done.
What to watch
- OpenAI publishing Pro 500's Work and Codex allowance as a multiple of Plus would show whether the extra $300 buys back the old volume.
- Dots reaching Pro users in the EEA, Switzerland and the UK would change what a European Pro seat is worth.
- Mobile editing for Space pages, listed as coming soon, would decide whether staff away from a desk can work in the shared workspace.