Mo Explains
Quick Answer: ChatGPT Pro 500 is OpenAI's new $500-a-month plan, announced at DevDay on September 29, 2026, after it leaked as "Pro Max" five days earlier. It's the only Pro plan with GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast and has the most usage of the three Pro tiers. Pro 200 reopened too, with less usage for new subscribers.
Last updated September 30, 2026
Update, September 30: OpenAI made this plan official at DevDay as Pro 500, and I've updated the details below.
I pay $100 a month for ChatGPT right now, so when a $500 tier leaked on September 24 as "ChatGPT Pro Max," it got my attention. OpenAI made it official at DevDay on September 29 as Pro 500. The number doesn't bother me. I can picture the month I'd buy it.
What OpenAI announced for ChatGPT Pro 500
Pro 500 costs $500 a month, and it's the only Pro plan that includes GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast. OpenAI's help page says it "offers the highest included usage of the three plans," so the ladder now runs Plus at $20, then Pro at $100, $200, and $500.
Ultrafast is the speed piece. OpenAI said it generates up to 300 tokens per second in Codex, up to eight times faster than standard, according to The Next Web. It also burns through your allowance faster, since OpenAI's pricing page says Ultrafast uses included usage at eight times the standard rate.
When it leaked, TestingCatalog said the tier "could target developers, researchers, and professional users running long agentic workloads rather than regular ChatGPT users," and a Codex-first speed boost fits that. If you use ChatGPT for emails and dinner plans, this isn't aimed at you.
What changed for Pro 200
Pro 200 is open to new subscribers again, but with less usage than before. OpenAI paused new Pro 200 signups on September 11 because GPT-6 Astra demand outran capacity, and its help page now says new subscriptions "include a lower usage allowance."
If you already pay for Pro 200, you keep your old allowance through October 29, and the price stays $200. From October 30, The Next Web reports that Pro 200's Work and Codex usage drops from 20 times the Plus allowance to 10 times, and GPT-6 Pro messages go from 200 a week to 100. Existing subscribers also get a one-time credit grant worth about $2,500 that expires at the end of the year.
My take: buy it for the busy month, then drop it
I'm not upset about the price. Most months, AI is basically my personal assistant. It helps me write apps, it reads the book I'm working on and flags plot holes, it brainstorms with me, and it helps me keep six or seven family websites running. It even feeds my Stoicism channel on YouTube, finding Stoic quotes I don't already know that fit what people are dealing with. For all of that, a $200-level plan is plenty, and my $100 plan covers it. Then every once in a while, and my ADHD brain is part of this, I get three or four ideas I want to run at the same time, with two or three apps going at once, and that's the month $200 stops being enough.
If $500 buys roughly five of my $100 plans' worth of usage, I could burn through that in a burst month. I couldn't keep it all year without hunting for ways to use it. This reads like a plan you buy for the one month you have ten things lined up, then cancel.
What people are saying
The r/codex thread on the leak had a few hundred replies by Thursday night, and most were about timing, since Claude Opus 5.5 landed two days earlier.
Weird time to drop it when they just fell behind, but okay.
u/CapableJury861, the top reply
I can't think of anything OpenAI has to offer that would be worth 500 to me. [...] Now with current Opus 5.5 performance i'd rather have 3x 100 Anthropic plan than try whatever a 500 has to offer lol.
u/throwaway490215
I actually know someone who could benefit from this. They are small business owners operating an online shop. [...] They already successfully replaced 2 employees with 2 Codex $200 subs. To them it's much cheaper than hiring real person so they would pay the $500 without even blinking.
u/a1454a
That last one is closer to how I see it. The plan makes sense for a specific month or a specific business, and most of the thread just doesn't have that month.
FAQ
It's official now, and it's still a plan I'd buy for one busy month, not all year.
