OpenAI appears to be preparing a new top-tier ChatGPT subscription called Pro Max, priced at $500 per month, that would sit above the company's existing $200 Pro plan and promise the fastest available work and coding performance.
The unannounced plan has started appearing in ChatGPT's subscription interface alongside the Plus and Pro options, as spotted by TestingCatalog and reported by BleepingComputer on September 25. OpenAI has not announced Pro Max, and the company has not responded publicly to questions about the listing. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
What the Pro Max Listing Shows
According to the report, one version of the subscription page lists Pro Max at $500 per month, while another variant displays $600 once local taxes or VAT are included. The most distinctive line in the plan's description is "Fastest Work and Codex," a pitch aimed squarely at users whose workloads are bottlenecked by generation speed rather than raw capability.
The listing also teases access to OpenAI's most capable frontier models, maximum memory, 100GB of file storage, and early access to new features. Early access, however, is not a new perk: the existing $200 Pro plan already promises it, and BleepingComputer noted it is unclear whether that benefit would become exclusive to the higher tier or remain in both.
Because OpenAI has not announced the plan, its exact usage limits are unknown. If the tier follows the pattern of ChatGPT's previous upgrades, substantially higher allowances than current Pro plans would be the central selling point.
A Plan Aimed at Users Who Keep Hitting the Ceiling
The $500 tier would not be arriving in a vacuum. Power users have been asking for more usage than the $200 Pro plan offers, particularly heavy Codex users who run agentic coding sessions for hours at a time. A higher-priced plan is a direct response to that demand, and it follows the logic that convinced OpenAI to introduce the $200 tier in the first place: some customers will pay several times more for several times more capacity.
Timing matters here, too. Upgrades and new sign-ups for the $200 ChatGPT Pro plan have been temporarily paused since September 10, according to BleepingComputer, which has fueled speculation that OpenAI is reshaping its top-of-funnel plans. ChatGPT currently offers Pro tiers at $100 and $200 per month.
A paused $200 plan plus a visible $500 listing suggests the company may be preparing to reorganize how its most expensive subscriptions are sold, though nothing in the listing itself confirms when, or whether, Pro Max will officially launch.
The Cerebras Question
The phrase "Fastest Work and Codex" has already set off speculation about what would power that speed. BleepingComputer flagged Cerebras as a plausible candidate, noting that OpenAI has deployed Cerebras hardware for ultra-fast inference before.
The track record is real, but it is also dated. Earlier this year, Codex-Spark launched on Cerebras hardware running at more than 1,000 tokens per second, and OpenAI later demonstrated GPT-5.6 Sol reaching up to 750 output tokens per second in its Cerebras-powered Ultrafast mode. Neither OpenAI nor Cerebras has confirmed any connection between that infrastructure and the Pro Max listing, so the association remains a reasonable guess rather than a disclosed fact.
If high-speed inference does become a paid differentiator, it would mark a notable shift. Speed has generally been treated as a baseline engineering target rather than a premium feature, but as models converge on similar capability levels, latency and throughput are among the remaining axes on which plans can realistically compete.
What It Would Mean for ChatGPT's Pricing Ladder
A $500 plan would more than double the price of ChatGPT's most expensive current tier, deepening the ladder that runs from the free product through Plus and the $100 and $200 Pro options. For OpenAI, each new rung monetizes its heaviest users, the ones whose compute consumption makes flat-rate plans expensive to serve.
For buyers, the calculus depends on information OpenAI has not yet provided: real usage limits, which models are included, and whether the speed claims translate into materially faster coding sessions in practice. The listing promises "fastest," not a number.
What Buyers Should Watch For
Until OpenAI confirms the plan, a few details will determine whether Pro Max is genuinely useful or simply more expensive. The first is usage limits: the value of any top tier lives in how much work it allows before throttling, and none of that has been disclosed. The second is which models are bundled, since "frontier models" in the listing is a marketing phrase rather than a model list. The third is whether the speed promise applies to everyday chat or specifically to Codex and other agentic workloads, where generation speed has the most obvious impact on productivity.
There is also the question of who keeps what. If early access to new features migrates from the $200 plan to Pro Max, existing Pro subscribers would effectively lose a benefit they pay for today, a move that would not go unnoticed by the community that has already been frustrated by the pause on new Pro upgrades.
For now, Pro Max remains an unannounced plan visible only in parts of ChatGPT's interface. The reasonable read of the evidence is that OpenAI is at least testing the price point and the packaging, and that power users who have been asking for headroom beyond the $200 plan may soon have an option, at a price to match. When asked about a launch window, the honest answer from everyone watching is the same one the report gives: it is not yet known.
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