In short: OpenAI launched a new $100/month Pro plan for ChatGPT on April 9, 2026, adding a new tier between the existing $20 Plus plan and the $200 Pro plan, directly targeting Anthropic’s Claude Max, which is $100/month. The new plan offers five times more Codex usage than Plus, access to the same model set as the $200 tier, and a promotion that temporarily doubles that benefit: until May 31, 2026, subscribers get ten times more Codex usage than Plus. The move follows a growth rate the company described as a 5x increase in three months after Codex surpassed three million weekly users on April 8.
What is included in the $100 plan and where does it fit into ChatGPT’s pricing structure?
The new plan is the sixth price tier in ChatGPT’s current structure, which now runs from an ad-free account with an $8 per month Go plan, a $20 per month Plus plan, two versions of Pro at $100 and $200 per month, a $25 per user per month Business plan, and specially priced Enterprise contracts. The $100 Pro plan sits directly between Plus and the existing $200 Pro tier, offering five times more Codex usage than Plus and targeting what OpenAI describes as “longer, high-effort Codex sessions” that Plus subscribers hit the ceiling. By comparison, the $200 Pro plan provides 20 times the Codex usage of Plus, making it four times more Codex-intensive than the new $100 tier.
Despite the difference in usage limits, both Pro levels provide access to the same set of models: the exclusive GPT-5.4 Pro model, unlimited use of GPT-5.4 Instant and GPT-5.4 Thinking, and all other features available in the $200 plan. The difference between the two tiers is not capacity, but usage volume. As a launch promotion, subscribers to the new $100 plan will get ten times Codex usage from Plus until May 31, 2026; after that date, the standard five-time limit applies. OpenAI also announced that, along with the new tier, the Plus plan has been rebalanced in the Codex distribution, shifting Plus towards steady daily use rather than allowing for the longer burst sessions that the $100 plan is meant to serve.
Codex Requirement: pushing numbers to a new level
On April 8, 2026, the day before the $100 plan was announced, Sam Altman posted on X that OpenAI was resetting Codex’s usage limits on all plans to “record 3M weekly codex users” and committed to repeating the reset for each additional million users until Codex reached ten million weekly users. Codex product lead Thibault Sottiaux said: “Three million people use Codex weekly, up from just over two million a month ago.” OpenAI described its growth trajectory as 5x growth over the previous three months, with 70% month-over-month user growth.
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The magnitude of this growth reflects a shift in how developers use AI coding tools. OpenAI released a custom Codex app for macOS in February 2026It’s designed to move beyond line-by-line code generation to what the company calls agent-based, multi-tasking coding workflows: orchestrating multiple agents in parallel, running background jobs and handling instructions that span hours, not seconds. This architecture, with longer sessions and heavier computing requirements, is the use case that the $100 plan is designed to capture. A Plus subscriber using Codex for extended autonomous engineering tasks reaches usage limits before the end of the billing cycle; The $100 plan is designed to be the next logical level, not a leap to $200.
Comparison of Claude Max
OpenAI made no attempt to hide its competitive framework. The new plan is priced the same as Anthropic’s Claude Max 5x tier, which costs $100 per month and includes higher limits for Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based agent coding product. Claude Code has become the fastest-growing part of Anthropic’s commercial portfolio, with annual revenue of $2.5 billion by early 2026, and Anthropic is building a developer ecosystem around it: Anthropic launched its Claude-powered enterprise software marketplace in March 2026With launch partners including Snowflake, Harvey and Replit, it connects enterprise buyers with third-party applications built on Claude.
The competitive dynamic intensified in the week leading up to OpenAI’s announcement. On April 4, 2026 Anthropic banned third-party agents from Claude Pro and Max subscriptionsprevent subscribers from redirecting their plan’s usage limits through external frameworks such as OpenClaw; users who wish to continue using these tools must now pay separately for a new session”additional use” system. OpenAI’s announcement went in the opposite direction, increasing Codex availability at the $100 price point and temporarily doubling it to mark the release. The contrast to the same price was apparent enough that most coverage described the new plan as a direct response to Anthropic’s developer subscriber base.
What are OpenAI’s price action signals?
The new level comes at a time when commercial momentum is accelerating for OpenAI. OpenAI’s $122 billion raise at $852 billion valuation completes March 2026It was led by SoftBank, NVIDIA and Amazon and included $3 billion from individual retail investors, a structure many analysts read as the basis for an IPO expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. The company earns $2 billion in monthly revenue and has more than 50 million paid subscribers on its plans. The $100 plan is part of a deliberate effort to bridge the price gap between $20 and $200, which has until now left a large segment of heavy but non-enterprise users without a forced upgrade path.
A model that boosts Pro levels, GPT-5.4, which was released in March 2026 and introduced native computer usage directly into Codex and API is the clearest indication of where OpenAI’s next phase of developer adoption is headed: autonomous agents, not software, that manage software, navigate file systems, and manage multi-step workflows between applications in a matter of hours. The $100 plan is the price statement for this bet. Whether Anthropic moves enough developers at the $100 Claude Max price point to make a measurable difference in its subscriber base will be seen in both companies’ next quarterly figures.
