OpenAI Codex head Tibo announced that the $200 Pro subscription will be reopened to new subscribers, with a revised usage algorithm: based on API costs, the new tier is approximately half of the old $200 plan. He stated that the 5-hour window will not be restored, and the weekly quota can be used all at once; he also previewed that a feature allowing usage without consumption will be added the next day, with details not yet disclosed.

Starting September 10, this tier had suspended new purchases and upgrades from free, Go, Plus, or the $100 Pro plan, citing excessive demand after the launch of GPT-6 Astra. Existing $200 subscribers will continue to renew under the original contract. The tier structure is 5 times and 20 times that of Plus: $100 is about 5 times, and $200 is about 20 times. Under the old plan, the $200 tier for GPT-6 Astra allowed approximately 100 to 900 local messages every 5 hours, Sol about 300 to 3000, and Luna about 7000 to 56000.

Tibo provided a hedge: the models are more efficient, and API price reductions will be passed on to subscriptions, allowing "the same dollar to do more work." This week, the API pricing for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna has been reduced to half of the previous generation, with Sol priced at about $2 per million tokens input and $10 output. He expressed reluctance to first raise API prices and then discount them to create a perception of being "very cost-effective," hoping in the long term to narrow the gap between API purchases and subscriptions. Astra remains a high-priced tier, with publicly available rates far exceeding those of Sol and Luna; he did not announce a simultaneous half-price for Astra.

It has not been confirmed that a $500 tier will be launched. The community interprets "API dollars halved" as: if continuing to primarily use Astra, the high-priced model quota that $200 can buy is approximately cut in half; if switching to the now-reduced Sol or Luna, the completed task volume may be close to or exceed that of a month ago. What the product side guarantees is "more tasks, higher quality," not that the number of Astra messages remains unchanged.

Buyers are heavy-load programming agent users waiting for the reopening of sales; sellers are OpenAI aligning the subscription value with API pricing to avoid excessively high implicit API dollars within subscriptions. Funds are shifting from locked $200 quotas to newly reopened but half-priced quotas, as well as undisclosed benefits from the next day's bundling. The event-driven aspect is the pre-sale calibration before reopening. Beneficiaries are users who can route tasks to Sol and Luna; those under pressure are heavy subscribers who must fully utilize Astra's long context and multi-file reconstruction.

Source: Public Information