OpenAI Launches Ultrafast and Pro 500

OpenAI has launched the Ultrafast speed tier and simultaneously introduced the new Pro 500 subscription. The company claims this tier generates tokens on Codex at a rate approximately 8 times higher than standard, about 300 tokens per second, and up to 6 times higher on the API.

The Ultrafast for gpt-6 astra is now available for API, as well as in ChatGPT Work and Codex under Pro 500 and enterprise plans; the Ultrafast for gpt-6.1 sol will follow later. The developer documentation states that this tier is fully open in the API for astra, but the default rate limits are lower: 500,000 tokens per minute for tiers 1-3, 1,000,000 for tier 4, and 5,000,000 for tier 5, with a recommendation to use WebSocket to maintain latency benefits during multi-tool calls.

According to the official comparison on the Codex side, Ultrafast is about 8 times faster than the standard astra tier and about 4 times faster than the existing astra Fast tier. The API documentation states that this tier is more expensive, supports only U.S. data residency and global processing, and does not support processing endpoints in the EU and other non-U.S. regions.

The Pro 500 subscription costs $500 per month and is positioned as the highest usage tier, approximately 25 times that of Plus, unlocking Ultrafast in Work and Codex. The company has also reopened the Pro 200 subscription, promising to retain astra and the daily usable gpt-6.1 sol, and will no longer restore the 5-hour limit; reports indicate that starting October 30, the usage multiplier for the $200 tier in Work and Codex will drop from 20 times that of Plus to 10 times, and the weekly message limit for gpt-6 Pro in Chat will decrease from 200 to 100 messages, with existing user limits retained until October 29, after which they will receive a usage credit expiring at the end of the year.

In August, the Ultrafast preview achieved approximately 14 times the output of gpt-5.6 sol using cerebras inference, with a maximum of about 750 tokens per second, but was limited to a small preview. This time, the speed tier is being made available as a formal sale tier for astra, tied to higher-priced subscriptions.

In terms of market mechanics, buyers are those coding and proxy teams constrained by quotas, as well as API developers needing real-time response experiences; sellers are those separating latency from model capabilities into a standalone SKU. Funding is shifting from standard inference to accelerated tiers and the $500 tier; beneficiaries are heavy Codex users and enterprises able to convert iteration speed into delivery density, while the burden falls on the original usage expectations of the $200 tier and individual developers relying on mid-tier subscriptions to handle peak loads. This is an event-driven stratification: the same model is repriced based on 'can wait' and 'cannot wait.'

The standard price for the API side of astra remains $10 per million tokens for input and $50 for output; the existing Fast tier was previously about 2.5 times the standard price. Ultrafast raises the speed premium another tier, making it more likely for resident proxies and Dots-type background tasks to remain at standard or sol, pushing interactive coding and real-time loops onto accelerated billing.

Source: Public Information