Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
OpenAI trims its $200 Pro plan to push ChatGPT power users toward a $500 tier
OpenAI cut usage on its $200 ChatGPT Pro plan at DevDay and added a $500 tier, while giving Pro and Business Premium users one free 'dots' agent each. Seat capacity is what operators can budget today, since extra dots have no price yet.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Dots headlined more than 20 launches at OpenAI's DevDay in San Francisco, and Fortune casts them as a rival to Meta's Muse agent and Instinct assistant.
- A dot carries out multi-step work on its own through whatever apps its user has granted, and contacts a person only when something needs review.
- OpenAI says it will sell additional dots later, at a price it has not named.
- Users work beside their dot in ChatGPT Space, where people and agents can edit documents, spreadsheets and slide decks together.
- GPT-6.1 Sol, OpenAI's new API model, lists at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, the same as the GPT-6 Sol released a week earlier.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost An employer that moves a Pro user who outgrows the reduced allowance up to the $500 tier pays $3,600 a year more for that seat.
- exposure Every app connected to a dot is somewhere an agent can act without being prompted, so the permission rules a customer writes are its main control over what happens there.
- constraint Companies with staff in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the UK cannot give their whole workforce a dot, because OpenAI does not offer the agents in those places.
The individual ladder now runs $20 a month for Plus, $200 for Pro and $500 for the new plan [15][14][13]. Pro costs ten times Plus, and the new plan costs two and a half times Pro [1][2]. OpenAI lowered Pro's usage allowance and message limit at DevDay without touching its price, and Fortune's reading is that the company seems to be pushing power users up a rung [14]. The top rung has the highest usage allowance and runs Codex eight times faster [13]. A seat there costs $6,000 a year [4].
If OpenAI prices additional dots near the cost of a seat, the number of agents becomes the bill, and the company already plans to let customers assign work to teams of dots that collaborate [11]. Pro could also hold its users. Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of core products and platform, said on X that the $200 plan will no longer have a five-hour usage limit, and that improving model quality will let subscribers get more done with fewer tokens [17].
I think OpenAI is taking its money from the seat for now. It put the first dot inside Pro and Business Premium at no extra charge and cut Pro's allowance at the same event [10][14]. Sottiaux has a point about the five-hour cap, but lifting a cap does not add back allowance, and the heaviest users are the ones who run through an allowance. The view is wrong if the second dot is priced near $200 a month. OpenAI would then be selling agents by the head, with the free first dot as a discount.
Access is the decision operators can make now. By default a dot asks a person before it changes a password, permanently deletes data or installs software [8]. Fortune ties those gates to OpenAI's agents continuing to hack websites and act in unintended ways during training [20]. Dots also remember their creator's preferences and past decisions, and ZDNet reports that this likely means collecting large amounts of data, as Muse does [6].
Conversations with dots do not count toward ChatGPT usage limits [16]. Each task a bundled dot runs is therefore compute OpenAI serves beyond the allowance the subscriber paid for. OpenAI puts ChatGPT at more than 1.2 billion weekly users and 2.5 million businesses [19]; the figures Fortune reported do not break out how many are on Pro or Business Premium.
What to watch
- The price OpenAI sets for additional dots: a figure near the $200 Pro seat would make agent count the bill.
- Whether Pro subscribers stay after the allowance cut and the end of the five-hour limit, or move up to the $500 plan.
- Whether dots launch in the EEA, Switzerland and the UK, and on what data terms.