OpenAI Launches $100/Month ChatGPT Pro Tier to Rival Anthropic’s Claude Code

What Happened

OpenAI on April 9, 2026 launched a new $100/month subscription tier for ChatGPT, as reported by TechCrunch. The plan slots between the existing $20/month Plus tier and the $200/month Pro plan — which remains purchasable but was absent from OpenAI’s public pricing page at the time of announcement. OpenAI confirmed the $200 plan’s continued availability in a statement to TechCrunch.

Why It Matters

OpenAI’s consumer subscription lineup offered no middle ground between $20 and $200 until this week, a pricing gap that developer-focused users had flagged as a barrier to higher-tier adoption. Anthropic has offered a $100/month tier for Claude throughout that same period. OpenAI’s announcement directly names Claude Code as the competitive target, making the pricing matchup explicit rather than implicit.

Technical Details

The $100/month plan delivers five times the Codex usage allocation of the Plus plan. The $200/month plan continues to offer 20 times the Plus limits; OpenAI’s FAQ describes this as sufficient for “your most demanding workflows continuously, even across parallel projects.” Both Pro tiers share the same core feature set — rate limits are the sole differentiator between them.

OpenAI told TechCrunch that more than three million users access Codex weekly, a figure the company characterized as up fivefold over the past three months, with month-over-month growth exceeding 70%. The $100 tier’s enhanced Codex limits apply only through May 31, 2026; OpenAI has not disclosed what the post-deadline allocation will be.

Who’s Affected

The tier targets developers and high-frequency users who found $20/month insufficient for sustained coding sessions but could not justify $200/month. An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch: “The new $100 Pro Tier is designed to give developers more practical coding capacity for the money, especially during high-intensity work sessions where limits matter most. Compared with Claude Code, Codex delivers more coding capacity per dollar across paid tiers, with the difference showing up most clearly during active coding use.” Anthropic, named directly in that statement, is the most immediately identified competitor.

What’s Next

The current elevated Codex limits on the $100 plan will be reduced after May 31, 2026; the post-deadline allocation has not been announced, meaning early adopters who benchmark their usage now may find conditions change materially within two months. OpenAI has not indicated when or whether the $100 tier will be added to its public pricing page, despite the $200 plan already being absent from that listing.