OpenAI launches $500/month ChatGPT Pro 500 with Astra Ultrafast and cuts the usage allowance on new Pro 200 subscriptions

New subscriptions include a lower usage allowance to reflect our increasingly efficient models. Actual lol. The efficiency is always in their favor, never mine.

Oh don't worry, you get to keep the higher allowance for a whole month. Hahahaha.

It's Uber saying new rider trips cost more to reflect our increasingly efficient trip routing. Enjoy the Lyft v Uber era while it lasts.

I guess they got tired of people saying Codex plans were better value than Claude Code. They were, and now they're not.

$200 was the top for me. I mostly use luna anyway, I can't tell the difference between luna and sol or astra except the big models do more ambitious stuff I never asked for.

Why would I pay $500 now when the $200 features just got rug-pulled? Pro 1000 is on the horizon at this point.

The $500 package is probably a rebranded $200 from a few months ago. Every provider has been cutting token allowances for months now.

Price escalation plus feature reduction leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. I want them to succeed so I can keep using the products, but trust erodes over time.

Am I out of touch for thinking hand-wavey usage limits on a $500 subscription is crazy? They still won't state the actual limits. Just trust me bro accounting.

It filters to people and orgs with a hand-wavey relationship with $500. For a one person business making $100k to $500k a year it's a write-off, kinda expected. I'd bet on a $1000 sub next.

Maybe they're milking as much as they can before open-weight models send the prices crashing down.

Naming a product after its own price is strange. It also makes it easier to change what's in the plan, so expect more downgrades at the same price.

In the EU it's €103, €229 and €509.99. Besides the naming being insane, the pricing for each tier looks like it was made by a different team.

Horrid value. The old $200 tier was 20x pro value, the new $200 is 10x, the new $500 is 25x plus ultrafast, but ultrafast drains 6x the cost.

The plan page just says "More usage", there's no multiplier anywhere. I literally downgraded to the $20 plan since they're not grandfathering the old ones.

So the $500 plan is basically one old $200 plan plus an option to drain it absurdly fast? I can't figure out the value here.

I run two $200 subscriptions and burn through both. I really hope Sol 6.1 is as good as Astra.

Lowering limits while raising prices is just the beginning. Migrating to open models takes minutes, do it before the situation is truly dire.

Cache reads are down 75% from GPT 5.6 to GPT 6.1, so they're slashing API margin and closing the gap between subscription and API. 2x off API for committed spend is still a good deal for a lot of people.

Funny how right before this they tactfully cut the limits on the $200 plan. Week over week the allowances have been dropping 5 to 10% for months.