Researcher Tibor Blaho discovered a subscription configuration for ChatGPT Pro Max, priced at $500 per month, indicating that it offers "the fastest Work and Codex" compared to the existing Pro version. The official pricing page still lists Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise, with the company yet to confirm a launch date. This comes about five days before the San Francisco DevDay on September 29.

The current self-service top-tier Pro is priced at $200 per month, with usage approximately 20 times that of Plus. New accounts were paused on September 10 due to demand for GPT-6 Astra; a mid-tier option was added on April 9 at $100 per month, with usage about five times that of Plus. The $500 price is 2.5 times the $200 tier, but specific multipliers, model lists, or whether existing users can upgrade with one click have not been detailed in the code. Screenshots from taxed regions have shown a $600 display.

Work is aimed at long tasks, while Codex can run programming jobs continuously for hours to days, making inference latency more valuable than single Q&A. OpenAI has utilized Cerebras for low-latency paths, including GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast, and the external community associates "fastest" with additional wafer-level inference capacity, though neither party has confirmed this connection. Anthropic's most expensive Claude Max is still significantly below the $500 tier.

The tiering reflects a shortage of computing power being translated into pricing. The closure of the $200 tier indicates that supply cannot meet the demand from willing-to-pay agents, while the introduction of the $500 tier changes the queue into a bidding system. Long tasks and overnight Codex consume continuous tokens, not chat counts, meaning the unit price must cover peak cluster costs. Unreleased strings cannot serve as contracts but indicate that the product tree has reserved space for higher tiers.

In market mechanics, what is sold is faster agent hours, while what is bought is inference slots ahead of $200 users. Demand comes from developers treating models as labor, while supply is constrained by GPU and Cerebras-like capacities. The beneficiaries are OpenAI, which can convert latency differences into subscription differences, while heavy users already queued at the $200 tier and competitors must adjust their pricing. Funds flow from monthly fees into inference bills, determining whether to reopen the $200 tier.

Source: Public Information