OpenAI stopped selling its $200 plan because too many people wanted it
OpenAI paused new sign-ups for its $200 a month ChatGPT Pro tier on September 10, saying the plan puts the most strain on its systems as demand for the new Astra model climbs.
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AIKey facts
- Who
- OpenAI, announced by head of product Thibault Sottiaux
- What
- new sign-ups and upgrades to the $200 a month ChatGPT Pro plan paused
- Unaffected
- existing Pro accounts, plus the Plus and Go tiers and the API
- Next
- OpenAI has not said how long the pause lasts
OpenAI stopped accepting new subscriptions to ChatGPT Pro, its $200 a month plan, on September 10. The company said demand for Astra, the model it released a week earlier, is straining its systems.
Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of product, announced the pause on X. He said demand for Astra is "really unprecedented" and that the company is "pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand."
Existing Pro subscribers keep their access, according to Fortune. The cheaper Plus and Go plans, the API, and Business and Enterprise accounts are all still selling.
The most expensive plan was the first to go
Pausing the top tier sounds backwards for a company that needs revenue. It follows from how the plan works.
Pro is priced at $200 because it allows far heavier use than Plus, roughly twenty times as much by Fortune's account. Every Pro subscriber is therefore a much larger claim on the same pool of computers, and Astra made that pool tighter.
Sottiaux framed it as the least disruptive option available: "We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible."
OpenAI has run out of room before
In November 2023, after its first developer day, OpenAI paused new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for the same reason. Sam Altman said at the time that usage had exceeded capacity.
What changed since then is the scale of the problem. OpenAI has committed to enormous amounts of new computing capacity, including the Stargate project, and it is still capping a product to keep the current one running.
Altman has called the Astra rollout messy, after some paying customers could not reach the model when it launched.
What the company has not said
OpenAI has not said how long the pause will last, how many people were signing up, or how much capacity it needs before reopening.
Until it does, the clearest signal is the pause itself: the company that keeps promising more compute cannot currently sell its most expensive product.
Sources
- Thibault Sottiaux on pausing Pro sign-upsXprimary source
