OpenAI trims tokens and raises prices, pushing compute costs onto heavy users
The flagship tier now offers half the tokens and a $500 tier has been added; agentic compute costs are being passed to heavy users.
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At its developer day on September 29, OpenAI adjusted its subscriptions: the $200-per-month tier now comes with half the tokens, and a new $500-per-month tier has been added.
According to Semafor tech editor Reed Albergotti, the pricing change was announced at the same event that introduced the dots agent tool, and he reads it as evidence of compute scarcity in AI: always-on agentic assistants burn large amounts of tokens, and serving them is expensive.
He notes OpenAI recently spent about $10 million over roughly a weekend to solve part of the Navier-Stokes equations. The pricing details come from his column rather than an OpenAI pricing page linked in the article, so exact allowances should be checked against OpenAI's own page.