Codex Demand Sparks New OpenAI Mid-Tier Subscription for Power Users

The addition of this new tier is meant to support the growing use of OpenAI’s coding agent Codex, the company said in a Thursday (April 9) post on X.

“This new tier offers 5x more Codex usage than Plus and is best for longer, high-effort Codex sessions,” OpenAI said in the post. “In ChatGPT, this new Pro tier still offers access to all Pro features, including the exclusive Pro model and unlimited access to Instant and Thinking models.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Thursday post on X: “It is very nice to see Codex getting so much love. We are launching a $100 ChatGPT Pro tier by very popular demand.”

OpenAI still offers the $200 Pro plan, which offers 20x higher limits than Plus, according to the company’s webpage dedicated to ChatGPT Pro plans.

“Our existing $200 Pro tier still remains our highest usage option,” the company said in another Thursday post on X.

OpenAI also rebalanced Codex usage in its Plus subscription plan to support more sessions throughout the week, rather than longer sessions in a single day, according to another Thursday post on X.

“The Plus plan will continue to be the best offer at $20 for steady, day-to-day usage of Codex, and the new $100 Pro tier offers a more accessible upgrade path for heavier daily use.”

OpenAI introduced Codex in May 2025, saying this cloud-based software engineering agent can write features, answer questions about the user’s codebase, fix bugs and propose pull requests for review.

Altman said in a Tuesday (April 7) post on X that OpenAI was celebrating “3 million weekly codex users.”

That figure is up from the 2 million weekly Codex users OpenAI reported in a March 31 press release announcing the company’s latest funding round.

In the release, OpenAI said that Codex is “transforming how developers turn ideas into working software” and that the number of weekly users served by Codex had increased fivefold over the previous three months.