OpenAI launched a $100 Pro plan on April 9, and within days the company had to send an employee out to explain what, exactly, people were paying for. That employee was Thibault Sottiaux, who heads OpenAI's Codex product. His explanation, posted on X, managed to be both clarifying and confusing in roughly equal measure.
The issue: OpenAI's pricing page listed usage limits as "5x or 20x" relative to the $20 Plus plan. But both Pro tiers are currently running a temporary 2x usage boost that expires May 31. So are those the boosted numbers? The base numbers? Some combination?
The math, as best anyone can tell
According to Sottiaux, the $100 plan currently offers at least 10x Plus usage, and the $200 plan offers at least 20x. Both figures include the temporary 2x boost. Strip it away after May 31, and you're looking at 5x and 10x, respectively. Sottiaux didn't directly confirm those post-boost numbers, though, which is a bit like a waiter describing today's specials without mentioning the prices.
Here's the part that caught my attention. The $200 plan has apparently had this same 2x boost since February. OpenAI just never documented it anywhere. So existing $200 subscribers have been getting double usage for two months without the company bothering to tell them (or anyone else) that it was temporary. The Codex pricing page now includes a footnote acknowledging the February start date, but that clarification only appeared after the confusion erupted.
Where it went wrong
The pricing page showed "5x or 20x usage," and users did what any reasonable person would do: they applied the advertised 2x promotional boost to both numbers. That gives you 10x and 40x. Makes perfect sense. Except it's wrong.
What OpenAI actually meant was that "5x" was the base rate for the $100 plan (which doubled to 10x with the promo), while "20x" was already the boosted rate for the $200 plan. Two different frames of reference on the same pricing page, presented as if they were equivalent. Sottiaux acknowledged this was confusing and promised the page would be updated.
So the $200 plan gives you twice the usage of the $100 plan. Not four times. For double the price, you get double the capacity. The math works out, at least, even if the communication doesn't.
Six tiers and counting
The new plan slots into what is now a six-tier pricing structure: free (with ads), $8 Go (also ads), $20 Plus, $100 Pro, $200 Pro, and enterprise. TechCrunch reported that the $200 plan has been quietly removed from the main pricing page, though OpenAI confirmed it still exists. That's a telling move. You don't delist a product you're actively promoting.
Both Pro tiers include the same features and model access, including GPT-5.4 Pro. The only difference is how much you can use before hitting rate limits. And the whole thing is framed around Codex, OpenAI's coding agent that crossed 3 million weekly users earlier this month.
The competitive angle
OpenAI isn't being subtle about why a $100 plan exists now. It's priced identically to Anthropic's Claude Max 5x tier. An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch that Codex offers more coding capacity per dollar than Claude Code, which is a claim I'd love to see backed by independent benchmarks rather than internal estimates.
But the timing is interesting. OpenAI also quietly adjusted Plus-tier Codex limits alongside the launch, shifting usage toward steadier daily allocation rather than allowing long burst sessions. VentureBeat noted this looks a lot like a simultaneous reduction in Plus usage, which would conveniently push heavy users toward the new $100 tier.
What happens June 1?
That's the question nobody at OpenAI seems eager to answer in concrete terms. The 2x promotional boost expires May 31 across both Pro plans. If usage drops to 5x and 10x as implied, $100 subscribers who signed up during the promotional period are going to feel the squeeze. And those subscribers will have been onboarded with an expectation of 10x usage that suddenly halves.
Sottiaux's explanation helped, but it also revealed something uncomfortable: OpenAI has been running a pricing structure where the actual limits aren't documented, the promotional multipliers aren't clearly labeled, and the person responsible for the product has to clarify things on social media after the fact. For a company generating $2 billion in monthly revenue with over 50 million paid subscribers, that's a level of pricing opacity that borders on careless.
