The AI Desk
THURSDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2024 From the desk of Amit Singhal Vol. I · The ChatGPT Era
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OpenAI launches a 200-dollar-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier and pricing for premium AI catches up to enterprise software

Unlimited o1-pro, advanced voice, the full Sora rollout. The number was the news. Nine months later it had stopped looking high and started looking ordinary.

THURSDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2024 By The AI Desk
OpenAI launches a 200-dollar-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier and pricing for premium AI catches up to enterprise software

On 5 December 2024, day one of OpenAI's twelve-day December launch series the company called "Shipmas", Sam Altman introduced ChatGPT Pro, a new subscription tier at two hundred US dollars per month. The tier provided unlimited usage of OpenAI's most expensive models, including a new o1-pro model with longer reasoning at the high-compute setting. Standard ChatGPT Plus, at twenty dollars per month, remained in place.

The pricing decision was studied closely. As The Information and Bloomberg reported in coverage the following week, the gap between the twenty-dollar Plus tier and the new two-hundred-dollar Pro tier was an unusually wide jump in consumer software, more reminiscent of professional-software tiering, where Adobe's Creative Cloud Pro tier, Bloomberg Terminal access, and certain Salesforce editions sit at comparable price points.

Who was it for

Internal OpenAI projections at launch, reported by Bloomberg in January 2025, sized the addressable Pro audience at hundreds of thousands of users in the first quarter, mostly in three categories: professional services (lawyers, accountants, consultants who could expense the spend against billable hours), software-engineering individual contributors at top-tier compensation, and a tail of enthusiast users running heavy creative or research workloads.

It looked steep on day one. Three years on, it looks like the price of professional software.

By mid-2025, the two-hundred-dollar tier had stopped being controversial. Anthropic's Claude Pro Max at fifty US dollars and Claude Pro Max Premium at two hundred had landed at comparable price points. Google's Gemini Advanced two-tier structure had moved in the same direction. Inference-heavy tiers became the default revenue mechanism for the frontier labs, and the consumer-pricing controversy of December 2024 became, in retrospect, a successful repositioning of frontier AI as professional software.

Originally reported by OpenAI (OpenAI) on 5 December 2024. Read the original report →
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